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WORK TITLE: Short Takes on the Apocalypse
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1954
WEBSITE:
CITY: Victoria
STATE: BC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Young * http://www.therustytoque.com/poetry-patricia-young.html * http://palimpsestpress.ca/authors/patricia-young/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1954, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and poet.
AWARDS:Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 1987, for All I Ever Needed Was A Beautiful Room; Literary Rites Competition Prize, Federation of B. C. Writers, 1987; National Magazine Award, 1988; Pat Lowther Award, 1989, for The Mad And Beautiful Mothers; Tenth Anniversary Literary Competition, Aya Press, 1989; Governor General’s Award nomination, 1993, for More Watery Still; Grain Prose Poem Contest Prize, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2008; National Poetry Contest Prize, League of Canadian Poets, 1996; CV2 Annual Poetry Contest Prize, 1996; Poetry Contest Prize, Room of One’s Own, 1996, 2011; B.C. Book Prize, 1997, for What I Remember From My Time On Earth; George Woodcock Poetry Contest Prize, Canada India Village Aid, 1997; The Stephen Leacock Poetry Award, The Orillia International Poetry Festival, 1997; Bliss Carmen Award, Prairie Fire, 1998; Governor General’s Award nomination, 2000, for Ruin & Beauty; Meltcalf-Rooke Award, 2006, for Airstream; Poem of the Year Contest, Arc, 2008, 2009; The Confederation Poet’s Prize, 2010; Great Blue Heron Contest Prize, Antigonish Review, 2011; National Poetry Competition, National Poetry Competition.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Making Connections: Literacy from a Feminist Perspective, Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, and A Walk by the Seine, Canadian Poets on Paris.
SIDELIGHTS
Patricia Young has cultivated a prolific career as an author of both poetry and fiction. Her work has garnered an assortment of accolades, including two nominations for the Governor General’s Award. Much of her work can be found featured in one of her numerous books, or in anthologies such as A Walk by the Seine, Canadian Poets on Paris.
Short Takes on the Apocalypse
Short Takes on the Apocalypse focuses on a central theme: parodies of some of the most famous authors’ works, many of which are based on some of the authors’ most famous lines. Young gives nods to the likes of Mark Twain and several others. Furthermore, she divides the books into halves, each of which has their own unique tone. One half of the book is more cynical, while the other simply floats in a realm of thought and consideration.
Young also experiments with form throughout the book, using a myriad of different styles for each individual piece. A Publishers Weekly contributor expressed that Short Takes on the Apocalypse “is definitely worth reading for the beauty of her writing alone.”
Night-Eater
Night-Eater is another of Young’s many books of poetry. This time, the book centers on the eclectic variety of people Young has encountered in life. She uses her poems to depict each of her subjects from her own point of view. The people described in Night-Eater‘s poems include a teenage girl, a sleepwalker, and a group of navy men. “Gift from Italy,” a poem featured in the book, deals with a woman and her feelings of mortification when the gift tablecloth she received ends up soiled at her dinner party. Another poem starts a son and father who are in the midst of picking up litter from the shore. However, this seemingly innocent activity unravels into peering into the father’s mind as he begins to compare the litter strewn along the sand to the circumstances that led to his son’s birth. The poem the book is named after chooses a woman who is struggling with disordered eating as its subject, capturing her negative self-image and uncontrollable compulsions.
Freefall website contributor Micheline Maylor remarked: “Night-Eater’s impulse is to take what is illogical and render it digestible in these poems.” On the Prairie Fire website, Andrew Vaisius commented: “Young is a masterful technician. She masons each brick into place just so.” He added: “Dolphins and roofers and sex and spice might seem like random hookups, but in a Young poem they aren’t.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, March 27, 2017, review of Short Takes on the Apocalypse, p. 75.
ONLINE
Freefall, http://www.freefallmagazine.com/ (November 13, 2017), Micheline Maylor, review of Night-Eater.
Palimpsest Press Website, http://palimpsestpress.ca/ (November 15, 2017), author profile.
Prairie Fire, http://www.prairiefire.ca (July 16, 2014), Andrew Vaisius, review of Night-Eater.
Quill & Quire, https://quillandquire.com/ (November 13, 2017), Safa Jinje, review of Summertime Swamp Love.
Rusty Toque, http://www.therustytoque.com/ (June 30, 2016), author profile.
Patricia Young
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Patricia Young (born 1954 in Victoria, British Columbia) is a Canadian poet, and short story writer.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Poetry
2 Short stories
3 Anthologies
4 Awards and nominations
5 Prizes: poetry
6 Prizes: fiction
7 References
Poetry[edit]
Travelling the Floodwaters. Turnstone Press. 1983. ISBN 978-0-88801-082-7.
All I Ever Needed Was a Beautiful Room. Oolichan Books. 1987. ISBN 978-0-88982-073-9.
The Mad and Beautiful Mothers. Ragweed Press. 1989. ISBN 978-0-920304-79-2.
Those Were the Mermaid Days. Ragweed Press. 1991. ISBN 0-921556-14-4.
More Watery Still. Anansi. 1993. ISBN 978-0-88784-541-3.
What I Remember From My Time on Earth: poems. Anansi. 1997. ISBN 978-0-88784-592-5.
Ruin and Beauty. House of Anansi Press. 2000. ISBN 978-0-88784-649-6.
Here Come the Moonbathers. Biblioasis. 2008. ISBN 978-1-897231-43-2.
An Auto-Erotic History of Swings. Sono Nis. 2010. ISBN 978-1-55039-178-7.
Pilgrimage: Love Poems. JackPine Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0-9865426-7-1.
Stunned. Leaf Press. 2011. ISBN 978-1-926655-35-2.
Amateurs At Love. The Alfred Gustav Press. 2012. ISBN 978-0-9877910-3-0.
Short stories[edit]
Airstream. Biblioasis. 2006. ISBN 978-1-897231-01-2.
Anthologies[edit]
A Walk by the Seine, Canadian Poets on Paris. (Black Moss Press, 1996).
Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry. (Monitor Book Co., 1995/96).
Making Connections: Literacy from a Feminist Perspective. (Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women, 1996)
Awards and nominations[edit]
Butler Prize, shortlist for Here Come The Moonbathers, 2009
Airstream included on Globe and Mail's list of best 100 books of the year 2006
Butler Prize, shortlist for Airstream, 2000
Meltcalf-Rooke Award, for Airstream, 2006
Governor General's Award nominee for Ruin & Beauty, 2000
B.C. Book Prize for What I Remember From My Time On Earth, 1997
Governor General's Award nominee for More Watery Still, 1993
Pat Lowther Award for The Mad And Beautiful Mothers, 1989
Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for All I Ever Needed Was A Beautiful Room, 1987
Prizes: poetry[edit]
Federation of B. C. Writers, Literary Rites Competition, 1987, First Prize
National Magazine Award, 1988
C.B.C. Literary Competition, 1988, Second Prize
League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Competition, Co-winner
Aya Press Tenth Anniversary Literary Competition, First Prize, 1989
League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Contest, 1993, Second Prize
Grain Prose Poem Contest, Co-winner, 1995
League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Contest, First Prize, 1996
CV2 Annual Poetry Contest, First Prize, 1996
Room of One's Own Poetry Contest, 1996
League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Contest, Second Prize, 1997
George Woodcock Poetry Contest, Canada India Village Aid, First Prize, 1997
The Stephen Leacock Poetry Award: The Orillia International Poetry Festival, 1997
Mothertongue Chapbook Competition, second prize, 1998
Grain Prose Poem Prize, co-winner, 1998
Prairie Fire, Bliss Carmen Award, First Prize, 1998
Grain Postcard Story Prize, Co-winner, 1999
National Magazine Award for Poetry, silver, 1999
Room of One’s Own, Poetry Contest, second prize, 2007
Prairie Fire, second prize, 2008
Grain, Prose Poem Prize, Co-winner, 2008
Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, first prize, 2008
Room of One’s Own Poetry Contest, second prize, 2008
Fiddlehead Poetry Contest, Honorable Mention, 2009
C. B. C. Literary Awards, finalist, 2009
Malahat Review Long Poem Competition, shortlist, 2009 & 2011
Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, first prize, 2009
Malahat Review Open Season Award, shortlist, 2009 & 2012
Bridport Poetry Prize (UK), shortlist, 2009
C.B.C. Literary Awards, finalist, 2010
Prism International Poetry Competition, Honourable Mention, 2010
The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Contest, Third Prize, 2010
The New Quarterly, Occasional Verse Contest, Second Prize, 2010
The Confederation Poet’s Prize, 2010
C.B.C. Literary Awards, finalist, 2011
The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Contest, First Prize, 2011
Room of One’s Own Poetry Contest, First Prize, 2011
Montreal International Poetry Prize, shortlist, 2011
Malahat Review, Open Season Award, shortlist, 2012
Prism International Poetry Competition, Third Prize, 2012
Prizes: fiction[edit]
Other Voices Fiction Award, First Prize, 2000
Matrix, First Prize, 2001
Fiddlehead Fiction Contest, Honorable Mention 2001
Other Voices Fiction Award, First Prize, 2001
Fiddlehead Fiction Prize, Honorable Mention, 2002
Room of One’s Own Fiction Prize, First Prize, 2003
Fiddlehead Fiction Prize, Honorable Mention, 2004
Journey Prize, 2004, Short-list
This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, Second Prize, 2006
PATRICIA YOUNG
The Rusty Toque | Issue 10 | Poetry | June 30, 2016
MY HUSBAND'S MISSING ARM
My husband’s missing arm was a mystery. Even I didn’t know where it had gone. He never mentioned the lack of it and I was too polite to ask. But he did have balance. He had style. Once, he stepped onto a slack-line strung between two trees, walked twenty meters before falling off. He taught life skills to young offenders. Drove the delinquents around the neighbourhood in a beat-up van, looking for odd jobs: painting fences, raking leaves, digging up storm drains. My husband was tolerant of the boys’ goof-ups and fistfights, their sudden outbursts and electric rage. Disabled? He could slice bread, chop wood and do one-arm push-ups as well as any man. This isn’t a story about overcoming obstacles. It’s about my husband’s merry band of reprobates huddled outside a country church on the day of his funeral. It’s about the strange light and typhoon rain.
THE WOMAN WAKES TO FIND
The woman wakes to find the man in the kitchen beating eggs in a metal bowl. He looks up, startled. When people crack, he says, nothing can make them right again. This has always been his answer to difficulty and darkness. He pours the eggs into a pan, then drapes the omelettes over the backs of chairs. Breakfast at three in the morning, the woman says. Ridiculous! They sit and eat but it feels less like a meal and more like an extended joke. The woman knows this is the beginning of love’s journey in reverse, that the punch line will land with a thud the moment the man leaps up and heads out the door. She knows that she’ll follow him onto the street and around a corner. For fifty years I’ve been the happiest man alive, he’ll call over his shoulder, do you think it’s been easy? The woman is running now, down cement stairs, onto a subway car, up an escalator, he’s getting away from her . . . losing sight of him . . . can’t keep up . . . hip hurts . . . out of breath . . . he’s entering . . . swallowed up by . . . disappearing through . . . a revolving glass door . . .
MY FATHER IS DOING SOMETHING
My father is doing something complicated with a vise and hammer and tiny nails. Is he a carpenter? Sandal maker? Good with his hands? Are the hammer and nails literal or figurative? There’s a knock on the door. Is it a life or death knock? Tentative or impatient? I open and two men in coonskin caps, exact replicas of my father, are standing on the porch. Why have they arrived at my childhood home in coonskin caps? Is this my childhood home? If so, why the loft and big windows, the gridlock below, the street honking traffic. Where’s the farmhouse surrounded by fruit trees, the rope swing? And why do the men look like my father? Are they my father split into different selves? Does my father have different selves? And then I’m on a train entering a tunnel. As it emerges into light I remember that I left my father smoking in the kitchen, without saying goodbye. I left all three fathers. I have always been careless with people and now it’s too late.
PATRICIA YOUNG has published eleven collections of poetry and one of short fiction. Her poems have been widely anthologized and she has received numerous awards for her writing. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award twice and has twice received the Dorothy Livesay Book Prize. She has also won the Pat Lowther Award, a CBC Literary Prize, Arc’s Poem of the Year Award, two National Magazine Awards, the Great Blue Heron Contest, and the Confederation Poet’s Prize. Her collection of short fiction, Airstream, won the Rooke-Metcalf Award, was shortlisted for the Butler Prize and named one of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of the Year. A new collection of poetry will be published with Biblioasis in the fall of 2016.
Patricia Young has published eleven books of poetry, most recently, Night-Eater, which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award in 2010. She has received numerous awards for her poetry including the CBC Literary Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, The Dorothy Livesay Award, the Bliss Carmen Award, two National Magazine Awards, Arc’s Poem of the Year Award and the Confederation Poet’s Prize. Two of her collections have been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Her collection of short fiction, Airstream, won the Rooke-Metcalf Prize and was named one of the Globe and Mail’s best books of the year. Summertime Swamp-Love was released by Palimpsest Press in 2014. She lives in Victoria, B. C.
Short Takes on the Apocalypse
Publishers Weekly. 264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Short Takes on the Apocalypse
Patricia Young. Blblioasis (Consortium, U.S.
dist.; UTR Canadian dist.), $15.95 trade paper
(112p) ISBN 978-1-77196-135-6
Consisting largely of free verse, prose poetry, couplets, and even found poetry, this latest from Young (Airstream) congeals works that riff off quotes on writing from a wide variety of authors, including Sophocles, Mark Twain, Erica Jong, and Elmore Leonard. This collection is an accomplished one, but for all Young's excellence as a poet, the book rarely rises beyond conceptual play. The book is split into two sections--"Spun Shrunk Broken" and "Too Many Guns in the House"--and moves between two primary modes, contemplative and cutting, respectively. But the choice to create disparate, tonally discrete sections leaves the collection feeling oddly weighted, and only compounds the problem that the contents by section, seen in aggregate, are largely too similar to play off each other well. This leaves the collection falsely unvarying, despite the decided range on display: "Family," "Hearse," and "Chagall's Lovers," for example, could not be more different from "Bite," "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?," "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," or the titular "Short Takes on the Apocalypse." But with its contrasts muddied the collection's edge is dulled. Nevertheless, the collection is definitely worth reading for the beauty of her writing alone, it's just frustratingly shy of being exceptional. (Apr.)
Summertime Swamp Love
by Patricia Young
Patricia Young, author of 12 previous books of poetry, has embarked on a peculiar mission in her latest volume: getting inside the psyches of animals with deviant (by human standards) sexual practices. Summertime Swamp Love is the apotheosis of the poet’s fascination with sex and courtship rituals of various animals, birds, insects, and fish.
Each poem is prefaced by a scientific quote that attempts to give the ensuing narrative an authoritative tone. Yet what Young offers is a mishmash of human perversions and existential ruminations projected onto unsuspecting creatures.
In “eHarmony: Whiptail Lizard Seeking Whiptail Lizard for Fake Sex,” Young turns parthenogenetic reproduction – the development of an egg without fertilization – into a low joke. the cold-blooded whiptail lizard is known to simulate sex to increase fertility. Young’s poem renders this instinct as nonsensical farce, conflating parthenogenesis with the casual sexual encounters of humans: “my blood’s / heating up fast … / I don’t need you / but I want you.”
In her introduction, Young states that what drew her to this endeavour was “the infinite and ingenious strategies nature’s males and females employ to cajole, bully, and even deceive each other into mating.” The poet admits she initially resisted the urge to anthropomorphize these experiences out of fear of entering the realm of exploitation; but these doubts were obviously cast aside.
Who is the audience for these poems? Childish readers who will snicker at the shock value of lines like, “I’m a ditsy birdbrain, sure, but that don’t mean / I’m gonna sit on my sweet passerine / ass and stew in silence.” Surely not anyone with a hankering for empiricism, as the poems oscillate wildly between fact and fancy. The collection is cute at best, and crass in its audacity.
Reviewer: Safa Jinje
Publisher: Palimpsest Press
DETAILS
Price: $18.95
Page Count: 80 pp
Format: Paper
ISBN: 978-1-92679-420-4
Released: April
Issue Date: June 2014
Categories: Poetry
Tags: poetry
Micheline Maylor
A review of
Night-Eater
by Patricia Young
Quattro Books
ISBN 978-1-927443-01-9
$14.95
Patricia Young’s Night-Eater provides a collection of portraits, not the type of portraits you would find anywhere; these are a Picasso-esque gathering of portraits with the angles jutting in odd directions and the style unique. Her choice of subject ranges from swabbies, to professor, from two stubborn Ayapaneco-linguists to a hungry somnambulist. Her topics help provide original perspectives. One of the finest portraits is “Daughter at Thirteen” (21).
She sighed in the bath, at the height of summer,
crossing the road, red jeans and black boots,
trucks whipping past.
Deep inhalations, slow exhalations.
She sighed because she sighed because she sighed,
running up and down the escalator. Tilted her head,
that exquisite sculpture, and sighed
as though her heart
were a kettle boiled dry.
Young’s accuracy of the portrayed blended with the dramatic irony, gave me a laugh. And as the poem continues, it reveals a theme in Young’s poems. Accute and quirky observation which cumulates at insight. She tackles a few poems that could be classified as eco-poetic, but manages to keep romantic pastoral out of the discourse. In the poem “Sisyphean” she talks of a man and a son who come to clean the beach every Sunday, while another poem, reminiscent of junk drawer cleaning, talks of “What Doesn’t Breakdown”:
I was on my knees sifting out Chiquita banana stickers,
Toothpaste caps, twist ties, Styrofoam chips, baby rattles,
Sunglasses, cell phones, keyboards, weather stripping,
triple AAA batteries, remote controls, airplane propellers,
medical waste, chaos, gravity, a house of cards. (33).
The mundane and small build to a subtle and profound observation. Chaos does not break down. Yet, Night-Eater’s impulse is to take what is illogical and render it digestible in these poems.
Patricia Young lives and writes in Victoria, B. C.
This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013
Night-Eater
JULY 16, 2014
young_night-eater
What an odd title for a book of poems. I conjure up a beast, or a fantastic creature like the shadow in Robert Munsch’s children’s story The Dark.
The title poem concerns a woman with an eating disorder that has afflicted her throughout her life. Young focuses on our perceptions. The disorder is upsetting enough to push the woman to self-loathing and to doubt her own sanity. The poem concludes with an image of the naked woman pressing a frozen pie to her breasts while a stranger sitting on the couch stares at her.
Has Young written a poetic notion for getting caught with one’s hand in the cookie jar while one’s pants are dangling around the knees – that is, a poem of guilt and shame?
Hold onto the image and examine what happens in the poem “The Roofers.” Young brings together several disparate nouns and makes them act in concert. To what end I am unsure initially, but remain patient with not knowing. Besides, she makes me comfortable with the extraordinary. Must I have a reason for everything that goes on in the world? “. . . . the neighbour rushes// around his house covering/ windows with sheets of plastic” while the men of the title shove shingles off the poet’s roof. A dead friend and her caddish lover, bottleneck dolphins, a husband concerned with his ability to shelter, sex and spices all make an appearance in the poem, and a reader might be inclined to consider the quote “Sex lies/ at the root of life, and we’ll never/ revere life until we understand/ sex” as the fulcrum to lever this poetic boulder out of the path of life, but I’d caution the reader to take a second, even a third look.
Young is a masterful technician. She masons each brick into place just so. Dolphins and roofers and sex and spice might seem like random hookups, but in a Young poem they aren’t. She thrives on ambiguity and twists while fostering a rapt interest in them in the reader.
Take the poem “Sisyphean.” A boy and his father appear to be cleaning up the beach they walk along each Sunday, carrying a garbage bag to collect the detritus of the sea. It comes to a seesaw:
. . . was the man saying food chain, chemical
pollutant, death of the sea? Or was he avoiding the eye of the one
to whom he’d so carelessly given life: What you got there, Bub –
doll’s head, BB gun, baby’s bootie?
The adverb “carelessly” is simply pitch perfect. The tone of the poem comes across as world weary, but the air propelling the tone is comedic.
Young’s sense of humour is especially perceptible in “Gift from Italy.” The gift is a white linen tablecloth, and the comedy derives from spooning beets over it at a dinner party. A sloppy serve results in a blossoming stain as the embarrassed hostess wants to “fall in love with a wood butcher” and head for the hills. Life’s not that easy, so she opts for the “organic miracle cleaner” that everyone knows isn’t either.
Young shows an honesty toward domesticity that isn’t bitchy or cheesy. What about this description of a newborn: “How like a fat slug./ Or a blind mole, burrowing”? Young’s gift rests in her honesty and indecorous and courageous eye on what’s important in our lives. ♦
Andrew Vaisius is a childcare worker who lives in Morden, Manitoba.
Night-Eater
by Patricia Young
Toronto: Quattro Books, 2012, ISBN 978-1-927443-01-9, 71pp., $14.95 paper.
Buy Night-Eater at McNally Robinson Booksellers.