05/23/2023
NELL by Ally Young (042) is available in the bookshop now (link in bio)! I first read NELL in the guest bedroom of my childhood home. In this setting, I felt suspended in time. I was reading these strange and utterly beautiful poems, and I was the texture in the paint of the walls, the dry wooden trim of the windows, and I was everything they had seen – at least everything that could be described as a small moment. This room was not the only room where this experience could be had, reading this book; I knew it as I read it.
For the first two weeks of her life, Ally Young’s parents named her Nell. I once knew a Nell for just a few weeks, in the summer, in the woods. I can remember her glance, kind and detached, and the way she tucked her hair behind an ear at the same moment. This book is unlikely to be about that Nell, or about yours. But read on, and peer into the places between the pages. “The poems in Ally Young’s Nell shimmer with the chilling ease of a slowly spinning disco ball — one round, complete thing made of many little mirrors, tossed light. Indeed a project wherein the very question of identity is approached fractally, carefully, Nell blurs the past tense of memory with a beguiling, visceral present-ness as the speaker gathers image and experience as evidence of possible, lived totality, simultaneity. Selfhood itself is the itch at which these poems scratch, the riddle this book is preoccupied by, and Young’s technique of shirking linearity works well to situate such existentialism beyond a forced clarity, however incredibly clear and sure Young’s voice is throughout. “Three deer. / There is no other way to tell you what I mean.'"
- Chelsea Harlan, author of Bright Shade, selected by Jericho Brown for the 2022 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize and Two Plum Press’s ‘Country Music’
