Pet Sounds

It’s deceptively easy to list things that Stephanie Young’s new collection is ‘about’: love, gentrification, gendered, identification with classical rock, the way capitalism structures the family. But the poems in Pet Sounds slide so agilely from scene to scene that each merges with the next, and none appear autonomous.

In order for a collection about identity to thrive and resonate, it must be a collection that lets everything in: that truly shows the nuances and complications of categories and relationships living alongside one another. Young seems to instinctively and lyrically know this; what’s more, she positions the poems within the complicated schema of modern-day Oakland, with the “bungalows ready for your move-in” and whiteness.

“Ave | Via” from Pet Sounds featured on “In Their Own Words”! Click here to read the poem with Stephanie Young’s commentary.

True to form, these poems often read as efforts to resolve contradictions through narrative (the speaker’s own coming-out story, for instance), an endeavor that proves at turns self-conscious, parodic, and deadly serious. “Unmake that problem,” the speaker proclaims, evoking the power of counternarratives, while elsewhere, she admits: “the path direct, had failed to keep it.”

Weaving across and through fragments, threads and short scenes, Pet Sounds rolls, sweeps and riffs on love and coming out, lovers and exes, animal captivity and a variety of names (from basketball players Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala to poets and activists Pat Parker and Judy Grahn to Troilus and Cressida), as well as criticism both general and specific on music. Really, Young’s poems, at least throughout this collection, are very much engaged in both music and sentences, moving out of one love, and one sense of self, entirely into another.

For Young, the sustained attempt to think beyond the heteronormativity of the nuclear family—to imagine forms of love and care that are configured otherwise—exists alongside a profound longing to return home. This kind of longing is most closely approximated by music, but not simply or straightforwardly, for music is a charged topic as well.

“Congenital” from Pet Sounds featured in Prelude! Click here to read.

Not only is Pet Sounds an astonishing book of poetry, it’s a surprising new mode of music criticism. In translating the album from a musical form into a written space,
Young troubles the distinction between artist and critic – and, in doing so, hears voices that have previously gone unheard behind the cacophony of white male privilege.