Darlene Young is an accomplished list-maker. Poem after poem in her third full-length poetry collection, Count Me In, published by Signature Books, draws out the minute joys and pains of everyday life. “One of the Three Nephites Currently Serves in North America” lists out the benefits of staying alive into the twenty-first century: Curbside grocery pick-up. Hummingbirds. Middle-school tuba players (pg. 28) alongside the arrows of mortality: global warming, late-night talk shows, hunched shoulders. “You Are My Asymptote” addresses a “god of aardvarks and yard sales, drowned / kittens and Bernie mittens” (35).
The poems try to contain the world in all its facets and tiny details, capturing not just the majestic or tragic, but the seemingly insignificant, all the lovelier or more painful because of its ordinariness. “Holy / is all breath— / even sour, even / yours” the poet declares in “It’s Christ, That Wayne,” and by the end of Count Me In, the reader believes it.
“Even sour, even / yours” is a thread stitched through the book. There is an element of chiaroscuro throughout the book—the weight of mortality held in relief against joy, the drag of doubt lifted by illuminating moments of faith. The title poem, “Count Me In” describes how “the smell of dirty snow, grim with the sins / of the city, makes everything taste of pity” but then leaps into a list of reasons to stay “in for the long haul.” “I still crave it, lick the back of the spoon,” the poet declares (15).
Even in moments of declaring dichotomies, Young plays with how nothing truly can be separated. “There Are Two Types of People in the World” lists couplets of supposed contradictions, but we’re quickly let in on the joke. “Some people snore, while others snort, snarl, drool, and slur, / as appropriate and on demand” (30). The humorous poem ends on a more solemn note: “Sinners / and gone” (31). “Things I Have Pretended” also holds up dichotomies and declares both are true: “That I missed you. I didn’t / miss you. That I like you. I like me. / I care what you think. I don’t” (39).
As a Latter-day Saint woman who rarely finds myself in literature or pop culture, Darlene Young’s placement of seemingly contradictory things side by side resonates with me deeply. So often, women are tied to Mormonism in over-simplified ways—we are in: steady, faithful, and well on our way to perfection, or we’re out: doubting, messing up, leaving. Young’s poetry doesn’t tolerate false dichotomies. They give the reader room to be both—to find moments of exultation in faith while giving attention to the very real moments of ambivalence and questioning most experience but few speak about openly.
The poet’s voice ultimately uplifts faith, but she doesn’t shy away from the weight of questions, doubts, and trials. “When I am worn / by trying for too long to fit into my life like the answer / to forty-nine across in a puzzle mostly blank […] I drag myself here” (40). “The difference between believing and wanting to / is a curtain in a breeze, a badly-timed sneeze,” she writes in “We Visit the Kirtland Temple, Now Owned and Staffed by a Different Church,” where the narrator of the poem wonders how different her faith and that of the tour guide really are: “Maybe we’ll merge in the middle in some new kind of place” (33).
By the end of the collection, I was left with a sense of being understood by the poet, who of course does not know the details of my life and did not write them into her work, but who nevertheless managed to capture many of the emotions and paradoxes I wrestle with on a daily basis. This, to me, is the most compelling hallmark of good writing: entering into a universal experience by sharing the specificity of a personal experience. Darlene Young is a master at this, with her stanzas of seemingly incongruous images stacking into shapes we recognize: “gossip of wind up the mountainside, / a careful creek” (18); “you risk getting snagged like thread / in the teeth of the world” (19); “a place of disjuncture, / of gaps, synapses for sparks to jump. A place of slippage” (33); “bearing my blunders / like bits of bone in my braids” (40).
Count Me In will leave many Latter-Day Saint readers with a place to land—a place where you can bring questions and pain, but delight and testimony, too. The language is accessible for readers who are new to poetry while maintaining a high standard of beautifully crafted, unexpected images. Try reading a poem like “Even Psalm” without feeling a lift to your spirits, a desire to step out into the world and love it with all its flaws and pain: “Holy / jack-in-the-box, strewer of breadcrumbs: / when I catch sight of your hem, for a time / I fear no evil” (58).
Thank you for such an attentive read, Lorren. I’m grateful to have such an appreciative audience that recognizes what I’m trying to do.