Here Come the Moonbathers

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.