Books
Shared Perspectives
Winner of The 2024 Orison Prize in Fiction, forthcoming summer 2025.
Praise for Shared Perspectives
Shared Perspectives is a brilliant vortical rush of mind and action channeling Pascal and Borges and Sebald but also Sarah Manguso and Benjamin Labatut, rendering elliptically what linear narrative would cudgel into meaningless bromide. Such a delightfully bizarre, lyric, dazzling achievement.
– Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Desnuda / Naked
Jake Young and Rebecca Pelky’s co-translation of Chilean poet Matilde Ladrón de Guevara’s third book of poems, Desnuda / Naked, can be purchased at Redhawk Publications.
Praise for Desnuda / Naked
These sonnets were rounded like rustic pitchers, formed from precious clay, and Matilde’s white hands made them shine like supreme emeralds. Along the lengthy coastline, I take these sonnets and raise each one of them, as if they were drinks: Health, oh oceanic night with unassailable eyes.
—Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature
Translation is the art of deception. The translator convinces the reader that this poem is an original, the correct brilliant version. Unless the translator achieves this deception, it will fail. Pelky and Young convince. Indeed, we may feel the original a plagiarism. Read Pelky and Young’s translations as the real McCoy with a happy boost. You will be literarily joyful.
—Willis Barnstone, Mexico in My Heart: New and Selected Poems(Carcanet), Poets of the Bible (WW Norton)
All I Wanted
Jake Young’s newest collection of poetry, All I Wanted, can be purchased at Redhawk Publications or Amazon.
Praise for All I Wanted:
Jake Young’s All I Wanted is grounded in the poet’s beginnings in multicultural California and in particular social situations, both of which he connects with place, nature, and the body. He reaches back to the speech act’s origins, its physicality, to what poetry is, coming as it does from “fragrances” of plants we gathered from the start, and not being able to “help / but name what we collect… / we learned to speak.” Young takes on the mantle of his exquisite capacity for speech, time-traveling from human inception to the Anthropocene age, reminding us that the ecosystems’ destruction is our own. The speaker implicates the smallest things in daily life, the egg yolk “bleeding / sustenance in this routine / that’s killing me.” Though loss permeates his vision, it would be a mistake to think that Young doesn’t revel in nature’s majesty, sublimity, and simplicity. “The black-eyed Susans / turn to the sun. A wild yellow.” I read this magnificent and smart book paradoxically, with an urgency tempered by the desire to luxuriate in every line on every page. Jake Young’s All I Wanted is all I want in poetry.
—Aliki Barnstone
Here is a volume of poems boasting the perfect combination of bitter, sweet, salty and sour. Always firmly rooted in the tangible, Jake Young’s All I Wanted uses this grounding as a springboard to examine complex philosophical ideas. Big picture questions about life, memory, love, and death all commingle alongside Young’s deft use of the natural world. The delicate beauty of this collection will astound you, as it did me, but fear not. Whether he’s drinking beer with buddies, contemplating his parents’ death, or describing the California wildfires, Jake Young’s divine poems will, like the stars in “Old Soul,” “burn so hot my light / might shine across the universe / and last long after / I’ve been extinguished.”
—Celeste Doaks
What They Will Say
Jake Young’s poetry chapbook, What They Will Say, can be purchased at Finishing Line Press.
Praise for What They Will Say:
Jake Young pays attention to the smallest details in the world which he sets in the right order to produce poems that make meaning, reveal the earth, and ourselves, and brilliantly cherish us both.
—Christopher Buckley
Young’s spare and attentive lines take for their model the great nature poets of history: Wordsworth and Snyder, Bashō, Thoreau. I admire their clear language and patient sensuality.
—Joseph Millar
In What They Will Say, Jake Young takes his readers on a journey back and forth between far flung countries, between the memories of childhood and the realities of adulthood. In less deft hands this displacement might be jarring, but Young seamlessly closes the distance between distant times and places, grounding his poems in a sense of home that only family can create. In concise, thoughtful prose poems, Young contemplates his world with a quiet voice that reflects the sacredness of the people, foods, and places that are his subjects.
—Rebecca Pelky
American Oak
Jake Young’s first book of poems, American Oak, can be purchased at main street rag.
Praise for American Oak:
American Oak announces a poet who has found his own way—toward clarity, toward a voice as grounded yet penetrating as Li Po’s, whose work is a subtle but luminous influence here. Jake Young pays attention to the smallest details in the world which he sets in the right order to produce poems that make meaning, reveal the earth, and ourselves, and brilliantly cherish us both.
—Christopher Buckley
These are poems of the earth, its geology and landscape, the fruit of its vines. The wine making motif runs throughout, deliberate and purposeful, all embracing. Young’s spare and attentive lines take for their model the great nature poets of history: Wordsworth and Snyder, Basho, Thoreau. I admire their clear language and patient sensuality. This is a fine debut collection.
—Joseph Millar
In American Oak Jake Young writes of spirits, longing, nature, and the everyday wonders we could easily overlook. These poems of the senses carry the aromas of salt and olives, wine barrels and pine, poems that rustle with a warm wind and invite us to be present in a world passing us by.
—Dorianne Laux
True Terroir
Jake Young’s collection of essays, True Terroir, was published in 2019 by Brandenburg Press. To purchase copies of this limited run collection, please contact Jake directly via the Contact tab.
Praise for True Terrior:
Jake Young’s True Terrior is a beautifully rendered musing on wine, terroir, and the human heart. This fine collection of essays reveals an intriguing journey through history that puts wine firmly in its place—not only among ordinary foodstuffs but emanating from whispers of the divine. Young takes us through sacred origins, associations of class, and the harmonic beauty of a great terroir that, as the author notes, pulls us “into ourselves,” and transports us with each sip. Young’s writing does the same.
—Nina Furstenau
True Terrior is a history of delight. While we might expect delight in a book whose subjects are great wine and food, we might not expect history. But that is the glory of good nonfiction and of Jake Young’s essays—written out of hands-on experience and infused with the history of those dedicated to superb wine and food. Young surpasses many in his insights to both, and most of all in his deep bows to the literature, cultures, and people who preceded him in the field—from Li Po to current culinary masters, to his own work in the vineyards. It is Young’s fresh style that brings it all off—reverent, exact, direct, and accessible. These are resonant essays, a true delight!
—Christopher Buckley