Growing Big

"I've felt for a long time that the poem 'Growing Big' is one of the finest poems about parents, a poem driven by an essential understanding of an old fairy tale, then complicated by the careful thinking and feeling and image-making of Tracy Youngblom. The book Youngblom has created, Growing Big, is a powerful look at gender, with poems that ask every reader to consider their own relationships with the powerful men and women, boys and girls in their own lives, a book of poems so beautifully written we live and breathe inside the poet's memories as if they are our own. Youngblom writes: 'the really great thing about love / is that it can only kill you once . . .' and the really great thing about this book is how every poem fights back against this pronouncement. Love: complicated, pure, crazy, correct, hard-won, unasked for, resides in every poem in this collection. Growing Big is a wonderful first collection. —Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems, and nine other collections