books
Tigers
PANK Books, 2020
Tigers is an exploration of a series of mutigenerational landscapes of the feminine--female adolescence, womanhood, motherhood, and personal revelation. Where the traditional coming of age story moves from “innocence to experience,” Tigers moves, through the excavation of trauma, addiction, recovery, adolescence, parenthood, and punk rock, from the ignorance and misunderstanding of a youth’s misbegotten “toughness,” into a turning inward toward tenderness and resilience—toward, in essence, what it really takes to be mature, “tough,” and--tigerly. With a principle focus on the dangers threatening girlhood, this book examines not merely the threat of degradation and assault, but, more deeply, the squandering of love through ignorance and inattention. Tigers here surely serve as symbols for such outward and inward threat, but also as a sign of the mature and tender maternal toughness of youth-grown-wise through trial and reclamation.
Find Tigers here
Advanced Praise
“Fair warning: these are ferocious poems, ruthless and ingenious in their determination to tell the truth about female survival (particularly what it takes to raise a young daughter in this moment in America) before that truth is erased or scabbed over or sold as cultural currency. Present and prescient, Young’s speaker notices everything in the fallen world. Her brash aesthetic edge is trauma layered with dark comedy—self-conscious, vibrant, shocking, dear. Street wise and surprisingly delicate, too. Be prepared, reader, to be jolted awake. ” – Dorothy Barresi
“How to describe Kim Young’s accomplishment in Tigers? Perhaps a series of bullet points would suggest something of the depth: a voice from the margins; a guide to holding on to hope; a handbook for exiles; a manual of reclamation; a cantata from the silenced; an alchemical conversion of shame. Tigers is all this and more. Above all, it affirms how fiercely we must love our lives on earth. And love our daughters.” – Marsha de la O
“Even before you reach the first of the myriad “Mother Ghost” poems in this mesmerizing collection, you’ll realize you’re falling—in the best way—for the speaker’s embrace of what haunts. Young turns language into prismatic sprites who run in all directions. If you are wise, you will run after them.” – Lynne Thompson
Night Radio
University of Utah Press, 2012
Set against the sprawling backdrop of Los Angeles, Night Radio excavates the kidnapping and sexual assault of a young girl and the resulting layers of trauma exacted upon her and her family. Working within the paradox of the insufficiency of language and the necessity of expression, these poems elevate overwhelming experiences into near-mythic narrative. Night Radio’s attempt through art to “make sense” of a seemingly senseless world raises troubling and timeless questions about the value, necessity, and futility of the aesthetic act. At the heart of the book is a journey toward reconciliation—wherein one discovers an abiding though hard-won faith within a complex, overwhelming, and, at times, frightening universe.
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Find Night Radio here
Praise and Reviews for Night Radio:
“The sounds of Night Radio move between hard-won revelation and pulsing music; they spread across the dry outlands of LA, a world of ‘silt and turkey vultures’ where men in trucks hunt for girls, and where girls kiss their ‘practice-hopes,’ then run like ambulances toward a ‘slick gentleman lighting matches under a streetlight.’ Watchful, vulnerable, quick, and shrewd, the poems shove through a broken world: El Niño’s floods drag raccoons and possums; a boyfriend becomes a place ‘my legs get to wrap’; a cop, a father, cannot protect his daughter from abduction. All this, joined in radiant waves to the ‘little signal towers’ of the body. A brave and accomplished first book.” —David Gewanter, Georgetown University
"The poems are so moving, I feel as if I am suffering as much as any of the characters. This really is an excellent book of poetry. Her story is heartbreaking." —Apalachee Review
"Kim Young's Night Radio works much as its subject matter does: worming its way into your ear like an urban legend, it lodges somewhere behind your eyes and works itself out in pieces, at night, almost against your will. [Her] debut collection feels real, dark, and deep. In the face of horrible and irrational deeds, we are still open to communication, and the book reminds us of that in startling and lyric ways." —Pebble Lake Review
“Young forces the reader to question the reliability and necessity of memory: what we wish to remember, what we try to repress, and what we know we must not forget.” —Boxcar Poetry Review