Featured Book: The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, by Michael T. Young

The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost. Michael T. Young. Poets Wear Prada, 2014.

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Michael T. Young has published four collections of poetry, most recently, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost. He’s the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his collection, Living in the Counterpoint. He’s also received the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Fogged Clarity, The Louisville Review, The Potomac Review, and Rattle. He lives with his wife, children and cats in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Description:
. . . explores the difficulties and necessities of violating expectation, both one’s own and those of others. Through this necessary risk meaning and growth are found. Throughout the exploration, questions of memory and history, loss and identity are probed.

Blurb:
In The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, poet Michael T. Young writes with a “dangerous brilliance.” Keening through histories, personal and collective, Young guides the reader to unimagined destinations. Rather than feeling lost, however, the reader arrives at termini of discovery, finding them to be inevitable, necessary, earned. Young enacts these journeys through cognitive leaps that defy reason and syntax, performed by his prodigious wizardry. And as the unknown becomes known, what is lost is regained, for these poems are redemptive. Each one is bathed in a luminosity of phrasing Wallace Stevens would have envied. Young writes, “[H]ear the voice in light / whose only utterance is melting snow.” Unlike snow, these poems will not disappear as long as important poetry continues to matter.  (Dean Kostos)


The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost

The secrets of a place are in its small streets,
its narrow passages, the alley in Venice
with cobblestones worn down and wet
by the humidity and dank progression of centuries,
the way we turned the same corner as others
in different years had turned into that dead-end
with its dark alcove, back doors and a wall
gaping with a niche containing a statue
of the Madonna and child, or in Florence
along a street where we pressed
into the painted brick to let a bus go by
while you pulled my backpack out of the way;
gnarled streets in Amsterdam, lower
Manhattan, passages like crooked fingers
pointing the way back to childhood,
when I liked to hide in closets, crouch
in a hamper full of clothing or make a tent
out of a bed sheet. Or the passes
and cul-de-sacs stumbled on in a beautiful
moment of being lost, the way we come
into life, without intention, snug in the primal dark.


More Poems:

The Adirondack Review

Rattle
with audio


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