Dean Young doing what Dean Young does, which at its best is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. ( )

There was a kid in the neighborhood where I grew up, who was always telling some new half-truth or piece of misinformation he'd just heard, which invariably filled him with laughter, disgust, and/or stark fear—a kind of giddy, wide-eyed fatalism—which made him easy to dismiss, but hard to ignore. We learned from him everything our eight-year-old minds could grasp about comparative religion, adult psychology, war, gore, and especially sex. It was easy to punch holes in his stories because he always got the facts wrong (I sometimes thought the people he heard this stuff from were deliberately trying to mislead him). No matter, though, because whenever we'd see him he had some new, eye-popping revelation to tell, and we'd listen, not because we thought he was right, but because of the revulsion and excitement and outrage that powered his stories.

Now, turn the clock ahead 45 years. Reading Skid, the fifth book of poetry by Dean Young, is like listening to the biblical Book of Isaiah recited by Robin Williams, or Pee Wee Herman warning us about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It is both high drama and high comedy—gut-wrenchingly serious and gut-splittingly funny. At first the poet's playfulness engages the reader in word play. The first poem in the collection begins:

When Dean Young vacuums he hears
not just time's winged whatchamacallit
hurrying near but some sort of music...

from 'Sunflower"

This is a poem that speaks directly to us, using homely words—"winged whatchamacallit" is simultaneously vague, alliterative, and precise—that get us involved. The poet also has something huge to say—a hugeness that makes him breathless and the poems almost incendiary in power. These are the lit fuses of cataclysm, and Young seems to be jumping around telling us about the sparks and hiss and the smoke. He's also vacuuming!

Dean Young the poet (whom he often refers to in the third person, sometimes even by his formal name) finds himself in a world filled with signals of threat, danger, and doom, and has to face it down with only his naïveté, guilelessness and a nearly impotent willfulness:

...It drives him
crazy how little effect he has. He thinks
of his friends at ballparks and feels
miserable. He thinks of women's behinds
and feels radiant. He's afraid how he invented
running by moving his legs very fast
will be forgotten, attributed elsewhere.

from “Sunflower”

Much of it is fun, but this fun has a more significant purpose. Young is warning us about everything he's found out—our lives may mean less than our senses, or emotions, tell us. Our religious beliefs may be wrong. Our overall importance in the universe may be minuscule. Our Deities may have other concerns than us. Maybe even our dreams are more real than waking reality:

One wakes up glad
that the errands of sleep
are over.
The day is yours
to fritter away on consciousness...

from “Honeycomb”

This book is a delight, almost exciting to read. The poems are friendly and compassionate and often funny. They work themselves into a lather of concern and warning, but they're caring and level-headed. They have the tone of confessions, but they're breathless, as if the poet found something on a spy mission, and was telling us first. Like that kid from my neighborhood so long ago—full of half-digested information, barely comprehended except for the danger. Dean Young wants to be heard, and he's telling us for our own good—because he's our friend. ( )