In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young's sprawling and subversive
first book of prose on poetry, imagination swerves into primitivism and
surrealism and finally toward empathy. How can recklessness guide the
poet, the artist, and the reader into art, and how can it excite in us a
sort of wild receptivity, beyond craft? "Poetry is not a discipline,"
Young writes. "It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright,
a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect . . ."