While the tone of Patricia Young's latest collection, Here Come the Moonbathers, is perhaps the more dark and difficult and tragic than her earlier work, beautifully hedonic poems spark and sizzle throughout. The poems in this collection have a wild freedom, different kinds of power, exploring the themes of love and longing and loss (especially the latter) with grace, bewildered bemusement, playfulness, and occasionally anger. There's a surreal edge to many of these poems, a personal, political and ecological vision, and an incantatory vernacular and rhythm that makes these poems unforgettable, and this collection perhaps the most important and immediately human of Patricia Young's celebrated career.

Matter breaks apart and grows new ideas setting forth a new island at dawn. When Matt R., a rock who wants to swim embarks on an adventure with Captain Higgs and his crew of other rocks, they learn how to build themselves up to form their own island of vast resources.

Love is a boxcar going off the rails. For anyone who has experienced the highs and lows of love and wants to know they are not alone.Patricia Young's new collection confirms her status as one of Canada's great and most versatile contemporary poets. In Amateurs at Love, she explores the dynamic, liminal space between lovers, taking precise aim at the silent climacteric moments of the heart: the interrogating, persuading, confiding, reflecting moments that help us feel and understand that distance.Her response is unexpected, unsettling and emotionally pungent. To the question of what is love, her interlocutor answers,I think it means a boxcar going off the rails, grain spilling down a gully, fermenting over summer, a bear gorging on that grain, passing out in a field, a bear that could wake any moment, hung-over and thirsty and ready to kill for a drop of water In forms ranging wildly from pangramic love songs to prose poems, Young guides her readers through the many layers of human relationship with unappeasable joy. Her poetic voice, her bold and unconventional metaphors, her rich incantatory rhythms and linguistic dexterity, lure us into a pulsing universe that leaves no aspect of human nature unblemished.