Echoes in the Gallery: Andy Young's Museum of the Soon to Depart

Andy Young is at the forefront of a generation of New Orleans writers who—radicalized and energized by the experience of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and the city’s long rebuilding—have sought to apply their experiences beyond the levees. The storm and its aftermath brought a new cultural understanding of “increasingly frequent and large-scale cataclysms,” as T.R. Johnson writes in New Orleans: A Writer’s City. He stresses the role of writers such as Young, who give “fine-grained visions of how cosmopolitan, multicultural communities like New Orleans have managed to hang on and hang together as long as they have.”

In her new book of poems, Museum of the Soon to Depart (Carnegie-Mellon University Press 2024), Young brings this perspective to other communities she’s known, from Appalachia to Egypt. Cairo, Damascus, Barcelona and other cities in the book are more than vibrant backdrops for art, love, and memory; they are crossroads of turbulent histories, marked by epochal change, aerial bombardment, plagues, and floods. Through her extraordinarily vivid language, Young transforms these cities into an enigmatic museum, with galleries that reach back through time to the very essence of dust.

Loss here can be measured in Smithsonians. Each poem is an object crafted from loving anguish. Personal and communal grief are major donors to this vivid, unorthodox museum. The collection, spanning New Orleans to Cairo, navigates its labyrinth of sorrow with knowing but hopeful routes. Young’s book is novelistic, picaresque, because it lacks traditional maps, inviting readers to create their own imaginative cartography. Like visitors entering a museum without a docent’s brochure, readers of Young’s work navigate its contents intuitively. There are no curators or security officers in the Museum of the Soon to Depart; its sections hint at an underlying order—galleries, archives—but readers are free to explore the collection at their own pace, perhaps by torchlight, as if wandering through a crypt.

We enter the Museum with a New Orleans poem, “Grief during Carnival Season,” which evokes a peculiar kind of hospitality towards death: “The dead are not picky; / you don’t have to wash their grapes.” Yet, for the living, this collection offers a rich banquet. Readers will encounter an array of vivid imagery—fish, plums, peaches, aish bread, cabbage soup, grass, hay, fire, and even “a literal heart”—all complemented by a diverse assortment of drinks: wine in green and blue bottles, 7-Up laced with cocaine, and milk. It is a book of mothers and children, exploring how their lives mirror and shape one another. In “My Mother’s Skull Is Opened for the First Time,” she describes a tumor “the size of a child’s fist/shoving out frontal/lobe tissue/where lives/personality,” metaphorically aligning the physical pain of childbirth, and how it changes a mother’s framing of the world.

Young has been exploring this territory throughout her writing. Mine (Lavender Ink, 2000) chronicles growing up in West Virginia, and witnessing the consequences of that industry on the environment and upon the bodies of her family. In the collaboration, The People Is Singular (Antenna, 2012), Young documents the courage and uncertainties of the Egyptian Revolution, specifically the photographs of Salwa Rashad in and around Tahrir Square. In the magnificent All Night It is Morning (Lavender Ink, 2014), she aligns recent Egyptian and New Orleans history, with Hurricane Katrina and the revolution as shimmering cousins. Although no longer publishing, the bi-lingual English-Arabic literary journal she founded and edited, Meena, which was published both in New Orleans and Alexandria, Egypt, put into practice her vision of international understanding and solidarity.

This is partly the argument of the book, to inhabit affinities. Her Arabic-world poems in Museum, through observing and documenting the larger-scale tragedies brought on by war and disaster, pursue different lyrical approaches, as if to announce, “Let me try this another way.” Those located in Egypt, especially, are flurries of metaphor and compelling images, as in the long sequence of visions “It Is Better to Pray than to Sleep (Cairo, 2013)” and this passage in “Song of the Plastic Bags”:

….their tombs

like rooms you could walk in
you can count the stars carved
     into the ceiling
     of the road
          for the dead

and the dead never leave
look the trash is singing for them…

In such poems, Museum of the Soon to Depart seems proof of Ruth Salvaggio’s great work of scholarship Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward (LSU Press, 2012), that certain places seem to retain a lyrical knowledge, a spectral musical knowledge that started a long time ago, and keeps flowing through generations, mourning and surviving in the same melodies of displacement, division and disorder. Young catches the reader’s ear in this tradition, breathtakingly. To Salvaggio, the New Orleans “long song,” a term coined by clarinetist Sidney Bechet, referred to a weariness in women’s storytelling and music that crossed the Atlantic from Africa in slave ships, and also from Sappho, “island songs from long ago, remnants retrieved from the refuse of ancient and modern worlds. The long song has a reputation for wandering the globe. It links the ruins of the past with a ruinous, auspicious present moment.” Young’s poems speak from these bifocal ruins.

In “night terror,” the speaker is engulfed in a darkness so profound that even open eyes can’t penetrate it. This darkness might be the guilt of a Westerner who suppresses the suffering inflicted on the Arab world, or it could be the agony of an Arab persona enduring nights of bombs and disappearances. The speaker questions whether they have become merely “a tunnel back / into the communal horror,” with “communal” suggesting a shared, though uneven, experience of suffering. Young’s work captures a complex engagement with suffering—an empathy that is deeply felt yet tempered by a critical distance. This coldness in her poetry serves as a reminder that true compassion requires more than just words. There’s a palpable frustration with the fleeting and superficial. The precision of her language demands an understanding that there is a difference between solidarity and the mere display of it. War is often the consequence of hollow language. “Night Terror” also reflects the banality of evil through the normalization of daily alarm and fear. To sustain this intensity, the poem calls for a kind of song—what Wordsworth described as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion”—though not the beauty of daffodils, but rather an expression of pain.

Young’s lyric forms groan against inescapable memories. “Villanelle of Her Absence” tries again to use poetry to flee from grief. The poet who begins the poem by saying “I keep on forgetting my mother is dead” resigns herself in the end to merely be able to say “I’ll keep on, forgetting my mother is dead.” This loss, evinced through many poems in the first section, “Display of Grief,” is the launching point for the period of time these poems comprise, and also for the voyage the poet is taking to find a lyric shape that might allow her to truly “keep on,” rather than staying mired in the hopeless loop of suffering.

Rhyme and other repetitions, while sometimes liberating, can also show a mind’s imprisonment by intrusive thoughts, phrases and phases one can’t escape. In Young’s pantoum called “Recurrence,” she is trying to “make/ music” of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, then quickly discovers there is “no music in this diagnosis…no meter in this music…no comfort in this cureless verse.” Similarly, in a poem borrowing the new “duplex” form introduced by Jericho Brown (another New Orleanian), Young is lyrically unable to escape the screen of her mother’s funeral as broadcast on Facebook, to accommodate grotesquely the pandemic grief protocols:

…In a Facebook funeral,
siblings sit a pew apart.

All my siblings pulled apart.
My father’s masked and small.

My father, masked: a small
animal from this distance.

A distant animal,
I watch the digital spectacle.

A strange spectacle: a digital burial—

Young’s framing of poems—where the “frame” is understood as the relationship between the title and the opening lines—consistently reinforces the “Museum” concept promised by the title. This framework invites a degree of interpretive flexibility. At the start, she evokes the vastness of a comprehensive institution like the British Museum, then comes to resemble more intuitive and eclectic models such as Los Angeles’ Museum of Jurassic Technology, Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum, or Oaxaca’s Museo de Filatelia. Young’s collection feels curated by a probing consciousness, expanding with each poem the mysterious precision of its development. As the book develops, it loosens up on the architecture of its premise, and speaks more personally, as if we had traded in the tour for the tour guide.

Ticking in the background of this book, the liturgical calendar brings the poet around to “Ash Wednesday, 2020,” not in New Orleans but in Sitges (located by the book in Catalunya rather than Spain). It matters what words you choose. The final lines of the poem—”a few weeks later the borders would close / again the rich decide who lives”—contrast bluntly with the earlier extravagant death-in-life tones (“the king’s erect effigy paraded/ to the sea and thrown in: procession/ of outlandish widowhood”) with the punctured balloon of the COVID pandemic.

Historical forces surge though in the closing poems of the. Historical forces surge through the closing poems of the collection. By this point, the hurt has grown so immense that it’s almost beyond the speaker’s ability to take personally. The Feast of St. Joseph, which always falls during Lent, is observed in New Orleans through opulent altars of food, both in public spaces and in private homes. In “St. Joseph’s Day, Star of the Sea,” Young stands at the altar of a neighborhood church and remembers recent moments connected to earlier poems, family worries, the city’s recovery after Hurricane Katrina, Alexandria during the Egyptian Revolution, the BP oil spill, the crescendo of suffering in the self and the world, which gives the book its last gesture, a sentence-interrupting “shudder,” before the ritual presentation of “bread we cannot eat” and “bread we can.”

Shuddering before such visions, Young brings her devastating vulnerability to contemporary poetry’s discourse of grief. One can only take so many books into one’s mind at a time. The subject of a poem is ultimately irrelevant. The paradox of good poetry is that it is real and must not be real. No one really knows how to do it. No one really knows how to solve grief, either. It seems that nobody really knows how to write a poem, how to grieve, how to stop suffering, or much of anything. Recent American poetry collections often enter too far into this territory, promising more than they can deliver. Young stands out on the more compelling and enduring side of the shelf, alongside poets like Victoria Chang, Natasha Trethewey, and Catherine Barnett, who administer experiences of grief, memory, and inquiry with heart and complexity.

But it’s Naomi Shihab Nye, both as a poet and as an advocate for the interdependence of poetic craft and political action, who I was continually reminded of while reading Young’s book, especially her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle, intertangling the intimate and the global.

Particularly in writing about the Middle East, each poet brings war and political strife down to a level we can grasp, giving faces to the statistics, as in Young’s “Tableau,” inspired by a photograph of Shaimaa El Sabbagh, an Egyptian poet and activist killed by police during a peaceful protest in Cairo in 2015.

“Tableau” begins with a simple description: “a man holds a woman / around her waist / his eyebrows raised.” The man’s raised eyebrows convey both disbelief and a plea, suspended in the moment of an intimate, almost protective embrace between two people caught in a moment of crisis. Young points out that this man is not the woman’s husband, noting how “that makes the image easier,” challenging the ethics of how we view and remember witnessing death. Yet, the relationship between these two individuals isn’t the focus—it’s the act of holding, of supporting a dying body. Young contrasts this gesture with the horror of what follows: “crop out what happens later,” she writes, directing our attention away from the aftermath, the death, and an ambulance that refuses to help. “Crop,” is a terrifying word here, the cold tool of the photo editor. Young’s final lines, “Hollywood could make / a movie of it is it wrong / to say that it is beautiful,” are both a critique and a confession. By comparing the scene to a Hollywood movie, Young nods to the lucrative commodification of violence, while also admitting the haunting beauty that can emerge from human connection, even in the midst of suffering. Among other things, Young’s poem is, as Nye’s poems also often are, a call for the poet to provide a truer witness, one with only the tools of precise language. Precision and compassion both require such careful attention to detail. To poets such as Young and Nye, they are indistinguishable.

In her acknowledgments, Young emphasizes her gratitude to Nye “for publishing my first poem and for lighting the way.” That poem, “Sister,” appeared in What Have You Lost?, an anthology Nye edited 2001.

In it, the speaker tells her sister, and it seems all sisters, that they “will arrive//at a point/when you realize/that you have been missing/from most of your life…” and over twenty-five lines describes the reassembling of identity after childhood trauma, ending with a promise to