A novel told in short stories, The Affliction is an astounding fiction debut by an award-winning poet full of memorable characters across America and the Caribbean. Young beautifully weaves together the elaborate stories of many while holding together a clear focus: people are not always as they seem.

The Halo is quasi-autobiography about a man who has wings and wants desperately to simply be human. Tracking from adolescence through adulthood, it explores an accident that temporarily paralyzes him and exposes him to human weakness all the way to his transformation into something more powerful than even he realizes. It explores a personal evolution from being prey to becoming the hunter. Praise for C. Dale Young “Young's poems are so fierce and serrated.” —Jeff Gordinier, New York Times Book Review “Young is a doctor as well as a poet, and [his work] demonstrates a skilled physician's combination of empathy and formal precision.” —David Orr, NPR “Sometimes the ability to convey information compactly and quickly has moral grace. [Young's] writing can put garrulous narration or evasive speechifying to shame.” —Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post “[W]e cannot rely on art to tell us the whole truth or even depend upon those who are supposed to protect us. And yet, [C. Dale Young] is compelled to make visible the darkness around us. Whether or not that itself is an act of tenderness, Young refuses to say for certain. And that is what makes his poetry a crucible where readers must confront their own beliefs—about poetry, society, and themselves.” —Christopher Hennessy, Ploughshares

In Torn, C. Dale Young continues his earnest investigations into the human, depicted as both spiritual being and a process, as “the soul and its attendant concerns” and as a device that “requires charge, small / electrical impulses / racing through our bodies.” What Young tells and shows us, what his poems let us hear, does not aim to reassure or soothe. These are poems written from “white and yellow scraps / covered with words and words and more words— // I may never find the right words to describe this.”