Portland Public Library

Can you tolerate this?, essays, Ashleigh Young

eng

Includes bibliographical references

no index present

essays

Can you tolerate this?

bibliography

1041230223

Ashleigh Young

essays

"A subtly dazzling - and already prizewinning - collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body"--, Provided by publisher"Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety. the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation; these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young's first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This?, Young offers a mosaic self-portrait of one young woman grappling with two forces: the external yearning of social isolation--a universal pang, sharpened here by the New Zealand landscape--and our internal relationship with our physical selves. (The title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient's pain threshold.) In essays of remarkable range, Young writes with warmth and wry humor of her youthful crushes on Paul McCartney and Beck, of her brother the fledgling punk rocker, of the unself-consciousness of childhood and the awkwardness that follows. Interwoven with these personal stories are essays in surprising keys: atmospheric scenes that read like short fiction, and true stories of figures like the Pennsylvania man whose medical condition caused his body to calcify around his wounds, or the Japanese hikikomori, who shut themselves in small apartments to escape the burden of society. As we watch Young contemplate the wider world, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks deeper troubles, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: searching, vulnerable, exacting in her observations of herself and her surroundings. [This book] marks the debut of an introspective yet widely curious young writer, a gifted chronicler of the uneasy tensions--between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation--that define our lives."--Dust jacket

Bones -- Witches -- The Te Kūiti underground -- Postie -- On any walk -- Big Red -- Window seat -- Black dog book -- Katherine would approve -- Wolf man -- She cannot work -- Can you tolerate this? -- Absolutely flying -- Sea of trees -- Bikram's knee -- Unveiling -- On breathing -- On going away -- Anemone -- Lark