9 Books Published by Creative Arts Book Company on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

In this latest collection, Al Young demonstrates why his poetry is loved and followed worldwide. At a time when most American poets are writing what Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls "a kind of prose masquerading in the typography of poetry," Al Young sings. His ear for music never lets him forget that the body is the boom-box of poetry. A master of dramatic monologue, Young continues to work in the many voices and forms that distinguish his work. Rare among contemporary poets, he almost never uses the pronoun "I" to refer to himself. His contempt for the unremitting arrogance of the confessional mode is hardly a secret. Like poets across the ages, Young is grounded and experienced in the pride and prejudice of his own times, and yet he can jump right over the moon and straight at the sun. Whether sonnetizing love or loss, laughing at smug social presumptions, condemning CIA drug deals, the thriving prison industry, bio-tech food, greed in a darkening stockocracy, or celebrating eternal verities, Al Young writes with spirit, imagination, and hope.

From the unpredictable author of Seduction by Light, Drowning in the Sea of Love, and Heaven comes this stunning new chapbook packed with unfashionable passion - sexual and social. Adventurous readers weary of the gridlock and stale exhaust of poetry a la mode will enjoy cruising Al Young’s backroads and blue highways. Such bewitching selections as "Big Bopper for Beginners", "Hours Before Touchdown in London", "Skin Tight", "Talkback Radio Retold", "A Lizard Considers the Season" and "The Slave Ship Desire" reconfirm what devoted readers have savored for decades: The poetry of Al Young is anything but cool.

From the first page: "This is the story of MC: young, black, and his head full of music. Orphaned at an early age, he lives with his hardworking grandmother, Claude, who plays the numbers with the same passion that he plays his electric guitar…This novel is written with the rhythms and nuances of a delicate musical score." From University Review: "SNAKES really isn’t a novel: it is verbal butterfly-collecting, a transcript, it is a musical score…the words leap from the page and beg to be lived…speech is allowed to be what it must have been in Eden: a way of loving."

Book by Al Young