No Other Life (Paperback)

by Gary Young (Author) "She took my two hands in hers, pressed and caressed them as if she were bathing me..." (more)
Key Phrases: braver deeds

Editorial Reviews

Review
...This is a book one must wrestle with as well as read. -- Sherod Santos

Gary Young has honed a sinuous, brief prose-poem form that carries a flavor uniquely its own... -- Jane Hirshfield

The language has been so thoroughly puri?ed that truth becomes, in the telling, austerely beautiful. -- Jay Parini

There's no word for what Young does, only for what he accomplishes... -- Dorianne Laux

Transparent and refreshing, vital... This is a book Basho would admire. -- Sam Hamill

Product Description
No Other Life gathers in a single volume two earlier books by Gary Young, Days and the award-winning Braver Deeds, with the final book in his trilogy, If He Had. Utilizing a radically brief prose poem that in its spare lucidity leaves after images burned into the readers imagination, Young weaves a pattern of compelling and often harrowing correspondences that Ethan Paquin described in Quarterly West as an exploration of thresholds, of levels of human endurance. Although every poem stands as an independent utterance, each book suggests a discrete poetic unit, and the entire trilogy can be read as a long poem in three parts. Critic Stephen Kessler has written: despite the tragedy at the heart of this work, there is also a sense of redemption and inspiration, of art capturing life at its most uncontrollable and squeezing out of it a sweetness that might otherwise go unnoticed.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 189 pages
• Publisher: Creative Arts Book Company; 1st edition (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887394957
• ISBN-13: 978-0887394959
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #833,719 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Our American Basho, November 16, 2006

By	Guttersnipe Das "www.guttersnipedas.blogspot.com" (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Other Life: Days, Braver Deeds, If He Had (Paperback)

I read all the prose poems I can find in anthologies and magazines. Of all the people using the prose poem now, Gary Young is the most unassuming and the best. Our American Basho, operating with zero fanfare.

These poems are short and untitled and deceptively easy to read. They are humble. And yet I've never found so much emotion in so little space. I'm on the floor before I know it.

This book actually contains three of Gary Young's previously published books: Days, Braver Deeds, and If He Had. In the poems included here, especially in Braver Deeds, there is tremendous loss of life. Parents, children and beloveds die. Imagine reading the headlines from Iraq, but without being able to close your heart.

His new poems, being published now in magazines like Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, are gentler. Celebration is made real by its grounding in the knowledge of loss. Hopefully these new poems will soon be included in a book.

All hail Gary Young! We would buy him a sushi dinner for sure, if he ever showed up in Tokyoland.

I won't quote my favorite Gary Young poems--it's better to just come across them and let them catch you unguarded. Here's one picked at random.

(from page 80)

My son is learning about death, about the possibilities. His cat was killed. Then Mark died, then Ernesto. He watched the news, and saw soldiers bulldozed into the earth after battle. Down the road, a boy his age was found floating in a pond. My son says, we're careful about water, and splashes in his own warm bath. We don't want to die, he says, we want to live forever. We only just die later, he says, and nods his head. Death is comprehensible; what comes later is a week away, or two, and never arrives.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A creatively compiled union of Gary Young's greatest and most meaningful poetry and prose, March 6, 2006

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Other Life: Days, Braver Deeds, If He Had (Paperback)

No Other Life diligently gathers into a single volume the three books written by Gary Young and includes "Days"; "Braver Deeds" and "If He Had". No Other Life is a creatively compiled union of Gary Young's greatest and most meaningful poetry and prose. A highly recommended read any and all poetry and lyrical prose enthusiasts who appreciate these literary artforms. I had never seen her so angry, and her rage revealed a measure of love I had missed. There were many times she might have hurt me that way and didn't. p. 50

4.0 out of 5 stars Prose poem as English haiku, March 18, 2009

By	S. Hanson (Fort Worth, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: No Other Life: Days, Braver Deeds, If He Had (Paperback)

Young does an excellent job demonstrating some of the range that realistic prose poems can reach. His writing in this book is often grounded in family situations and nature scenes. The prevalence of nature imagery left me with an impression of Annie Dillard's essays being condensed into a single paragraph. Likewise, the recurring brevity gave the feeling of a haiku from arising from a genuinely English-language perspective.

The first and third sections of this collection are more encouraging, while the middle section presents more sobering contemplations.

All in all---an interesting foray into what can be accomplished with few words.