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This week’s featured poem from Slate is entitled Upon Hearing of Another Marriage Breaking Up and is written by Dean Young. When I saw the author of this week’s poem, I had a feeling I’d seen his work before. Sure enough, his poem How to Glow was featured a few months ago. If you’d like to read more about that poem, click here. This week, as always, be sure to head over to Slate’s arts page to hear Dean Young read his poem aloud.
According to the Poetry Foundation, Dean Young has written many collections of poetry including Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010). Young has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and the University of Texas-Austin where he holds the William Livingston Chair of Poetry.
Upon Hearing of Another Marriage Breaking Up, by Dean Young
Saw an upside-down horse in a puddle.
Was a cloud playing a trick.
Saw a petrifying ruckus in the mud
where a devil lay face-down laughing
before being plucked up into the sun.
Such is our salvation: junco feathers
snagged in a rose bush. No need to look
for anything brighter, or darker. What
isn’t storm-pummeled into the dirt, shines.
Yesterday, drove by two workers hugging
in a field of watermelons. Looked like
it must have been a good year although
they probably irrigated like crazy.
I too am sick of instruction, my friend.
I’d say it’s fifty-fifty she’ll come back
and I don’t know the half of it.
You do the math. At the dog food store,
the bat wings look to be the first to sell out.
Apparently it’s not a good year
for fairy princesses, at least as far
as dog costumes go.
That’s this week’s Poem from Slate. I hope you enjoyed it! If you’d like to read more, check out our archives.
– Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
