Elizabeth Marie Young, An Inventory of Almost Everything

 

12 Strange Facts About Lobsters

Tell me one fact about Kentucky
Two facts about yourself
Three facts about Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Four facts about Janet Jackson
Five facts about the Victorian Era
Six facts about koalas
Seven facts about mermaids and August-born babies
Eight facts about earthquakes, Edgar Allen Poe and Usain Bolt
Nine facts about Saving Private Ryan
Ten facts about diet soda
Eleven facts about how deep breathing can hack
    the vagus nerve
And twelve facts about lobsters

The second full-length poetry title from Boston poet Elizabeth Marie Young is An Inventory of Almost Everything (Boston MA: Subpress, 2026), a collection that follows Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize (Fence Books, 2009) as well as her monograph on Catullan (and Roman) translation Translation as Muse (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), and a couple of chapbooks [including this one I reviewed last year, a title that does seem to have been absorbed into this current collection]. Assembled as a book-length suite of extended lyrics, the poems of An Inventory of Almost Everything work to explore and articulate a minutae of accumulation, cataloguing an array of everyday chaos into a kind of order. “Let’s learn the language of flowers / Let’s get stoned / Let’s live in the night hours in the company of corpses,” begins the poem “We Who Are About to Die Salute You,” “eluding our psychic censors / Let’s work some homegrown magic / Let’s work some miracles with the fluidity of gender [.]” Borrowing as her poem’s title what was rumoured to have been said by Roman gladiators to their emperor, she instead maps out a constellation of empathic growth, ways in which one might seek foundation as an empathic human, able to better function within the larger framework of human interaction, society and civilization itself. There are numerous ways poets over the years have attempted to articulate for themselves how best to be, or become, but this title is curious for the purposeful way the author collects such a range of unwieldly, world-ending and stressful narrative threads into such thoughtful weaves, offering both instruction and solace. As the poem “The Seven Characteristics of Living Things” provides:

We began living side by side, then divided into sponges,
various types of worms, jellyfish and their relatives, insects,
spiders, crabs, shrimp, sea anemones, trilobites, corals,
various jawless fish, bottom-dwelling filter feeders. 

Oxygen turned iron to rush that sank to the seafloor,
producing banded iron formation. 

The earth once more froze over.

We wanted it documented in a central database – the voices
that had spoken, which ones required touch to flourish,
which ones spent their lives in absolute darkness, moving
slowly through that darkness without knowing why. 

We wanted crystals, fire, snow, and other things
that lacked the breath of life.

“You would think it’s impossible. It’s not.” she writes, as part of the sequence “The Seven Characteristics of Living Things,” “You look at the leopards hauling their kill into the branches. / They too would probably rather quit than be challenged to change.” There is such delicate detail to her lyric, one thought or phrase placed carefully against another. The collection is, as the title informs, an inventory, a purposefully-crafted sequence of moments clustered, ordered and catalogued. “How dare you take what isn’t yours? // It was the easiest thing in the world. // I took what the universe gave me.” she writes, to close the three page accumulation “Don’t You Love Being Alive?” The poems offer a particular kind of expansiveness that is quite impressive for so sleek a volume, offering just a hint or suggestion of incompleteness, “almost everything,” and whether or not a matter of beyond her reach or purposefully excluded. “You know who you are.” she concludes, at the end of the descriptive lyric “There Are Two Kinds of People in This World,” or, as in the sequence “349 Things I Don’t Need to Worry About Right Now,” the cluster of repetition, a mantra repeated four-fold, writing: “This is just a feeling / It does not control me.” Throughout, Young offers a handful of poems composed more overtly as lists, utilizing such as a means through to an end in curious ways, from “11 Things Floating in the Inland Sea That Once Covered Most of North America,” “16 Reasons to Love Yourself,” “12 Things That Don’t Need Sweaters” and “35 Life-Changing Questions to Ask Yourself Today,” a piece that includes “Have you talked to the guy upstairs about all the equipment / malfunctions? // Did you actually just throw that reusable diaper in the trash? // Who are you really? // Why are you scared?”