'Mike Young is the Dante of post-boredom'

At Vice, Blake Butler serves up a swell and psychedelic introduction to the poetry of Mike Young and samples a few poems from his forthcoming Sprezzatura (due out this fall from Publishing Genius). What's the book about? "love and fear and money—your own devices—stupid contemporary immune systems—how we know what we know in a confusing era of fleeting information—how we know our feelings, how we feel our knowledge." Butler writes:

A Mike Young poem might explain the time he met Tom Waits in a cafeteria in the same breath as remembering the night he told his friend Bryan he was going to kill himself on AOL Instant Messenger, and then a moment later mention: “The more a game fascinates you / the less chance you’ll win.” The verse is slim and grandiose somehow at the same time, neighborly and ancient, as likely to swing through the gas station to buy weird candy as it is to wake up on a bus several states away from home. Young has some vaudeville in him, some Harmony Korine-like want for entertainment in the everyday, but perhaps the best thing about his work is the way that it seems like an insanely huge sponge made out of eyes and ears, vacuuming up the moments that most often disappear, and cobbling together monologues that carry their aphorisms in the same arm as their jokes.

I’ll even go so far as to say Mike Young is the Dante of post-boredom, guiding us through the rings of hell, reawakening something new inside of us that we have yet to become, hidden underneath the repeating string of days. [...]

Read on, and dig the Pop-tart sushi and coconut water.