The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost

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, AUTHOR OF RIVERING AND LAST SUPPER OF THE SENSES For years, I've savored Michael T. Young's poems for their potent distillations of experience, their attempts to pour into crisp and clear free verse vessels "something else the words can't describe." In The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, I am taken, poem after poem, through the musings of a keen intelligence, with "movement / from character to character, from stop to stop, / in books, on trains, in memory." What's more, these poems, like the characters of the title piece, seem to "come / into life, without intention," a remarkable skill from a remarkable poet.

-- GARY J. WHITEHEAD, AUTHOR OF A GLOSSARY OF CHICKENS AND MEASURING CUBITS WHILE THE THUNDER CLAPS In The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, Michael T. Young leads his readers into loving the world in its beautiful day-to-dayness. He does this by showing the reader, in thoughtful and graceful language, how to look and listen. In "As Is," he begins with "Although, for a moment, / the man peeling an orange / appears to cup a mouse in his hand / its tail dangling in a coil." In "Nocturne," he surprisingly turns July into January, and that month into love: "I'm walking these rising, white mounds toward home / where you wait in the habitable light." Michael T. Young joyously shares his gift, and his poetry will be read and re-read.

-- BERTHA ROGERS, AUTHOR OF HEART TURNED BACK