An Inventory of Almost Everything by Elizabeth Marie Young

In Young’s much-anticipated second poetry collection, the list form allows for the poetic embrace of a bewildering world that cannot be comprehended but can be endlessly explored as a catalogue of terrors, treasures and marvels. The poems in An Inventory of Almost Everything move back and forth, like the list form itself, between mundane reality and extravagant fantasy. They engage the form’s trajectory from Babylonian Star Catalogues to Buzzfeed’s “24 Tumblr Posts That Are Just Kind Of Weirdly Pure”. Here, the built-in rigidity of the form serves as a counterpoint to explorations of what is uncontainable and incomprehensible – consciousness, eroticism, spirituality. The list’s incantatory force is harnessed to examine and resist the “powers” that attempt to contain and control contemporary bodies and minds: religion, science, technology, politics and the pervasive discourse of self-optimization.

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An epic effort of listing: for desire, for encouragement, for gratitude, for the pleasure of strange juxtaposition mixed with insightful recognition. Here we have poems of accretion that share both question and quest. In conversation with cosmic origins and contemporary events, borrowing from self-help mantra, the poetic diary and surrealist catalogues, An Inventory of Almost Everything is a vibrant jamboree of poetic parataxis; it’s a relational network of delight. —Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

The endless urge to organize, categorize and catalogue is here put to wild and gorgeous extremes, generating an absurdist aesthetic of gathering-the-ungatherable. In the maximalist tradition of Whitman and Swinburne, Breton and Césaire, Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian (the list goes on!), here is Elizabeth Marie Young’s wild imagination expanding like the universe, spinning like an electron, drawing us in and out simultaneously. “Be joyful Be chaotic.” Forget yourself and let in the world’s overflow, “all of it and all of it an endless race against so what.” Yes! —Julie Carr, author of The Garden