​Darlene Young​

Blurbs:

     I have a complicated relationship with poetry but not with Darlene Young’s poetry. Her poetry laser beams into my mind and winds around my soul.
     The poems in Here are no exception. They are steeped in lived ex¬perience—pure, raw, emotion well-wrought. I see them and feel them and even when I don’t completely relate to them I understand them. Yes, their themes and images, but also the form of them: why they ex¬ist in the way they do. And this is just as true of the humorous poems as the poignant poems, and the angry poems, and the wistful poems.
     Above all, Here solidifies Young’s status as Mormon Literature’s great chronicler of the mortal body: of adolescence and aging; of the femi¬nine and the masculine; of power and weakness; of fear, sickness, and simple pleasure; of the inevitable march of time; of what it is to live in this here (and this now).
                                    —William Morris author of The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories and Dark Watch and other Mormon-American Stories

 

Darlene Young’s voice is full of wit, self-deprecation, and a wide range of emotions punctuated with enthusiasm as she talks to God as a child and to her sons as a mother. Is she “driving the day, or being driv¬en?” Both, it seems, because “each morning God . . . extends his hand.” She takes it, and lets it guide her through motherhood and middle-age knowing that he is with her, even “in the ache.”
                                   — Marilyn Bushman-Carlton author of on keeping things small and Her Side of It

Darlene Young keeps a record of the things that matter. Nothing is inconsequential to her poetic eye. Friends, neighbors, sons, and husbands take part on this plane where the sacred and the simple meet. God is here, too, moving in and out of Young’s poetic lines like the wind in John 3:8, which blows wherever it pleases. A teenager shovels snow and get his driver’s license, a mom treasures holy moments of the ordinary, a husband and wife age together through friction and faith. Through it all, Young testifies of a God who listens and heals, but—in his wisdom—not always. In the world created by her poetic vision, we see that the Good News is everywhere, even if we only catch it in glimpses.
                                  —Jack Harrell author of Caldera Ridge and A Sense of Order and Other Stories

 

Darlene Young’s Here is a hymn to “this jumblesale world,” a journey into middle-aged motherhood, into empty nesting, into God. While a youngest son is on the cusp of manhood, and a mother who worries if she’s done enough to prepare him for life, God shows up each morning as dance partner and “jerks / his head meaningfully towards the dance floor.” Her response: a “hell yes.” The voice in these poems is often playful and laced with refreshing snark, such as when she says no to addressing God as “Thou” instead of “You” in her prayers. Other times the speaker’s voice is earnest-honest, such as when she considers her heartbreak over her son’s heartbreak: “Either way, / it’s you with your hand out¬stretched, / longing.” Here is hyper-aware of the moment, ultra-atten¬tive to the now—at the cusp of letting grown children go, noting the body’s slow fumble into age—we’re reminded that all we have is fleeting, temporary, and therefore incredibly precious. We are gently transformed.
                                  —Dayna Patterson author of O Lady, Speak Again