Reunion (Brick Books 2018)

Reunion a parable, an origin story, a cautionary tale. It is also a time machine in which poems commune with ghosts in an attempt both to reckon with and subvert their legacy. A girlhood is re-inhabited and oddly transformed as the adult becomes ally of her younger self. Young has created a distinctive pastoral-gothic hybrid; her daring spirit shapes a collection both deeply generous to and demanding of the reader.    

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House Dreams (Brick Books 2014)

“Each of Deanna Young’s spare, pitch-perfect poems seems to contain a novel. Young weaves in and out of time, playing with perspective, to illuminate experience…. This is a poetry that makes memory sharper, consciousness larger, life longer in all directions.”
—Jury, Trillium Book Award for Poetry

 “House Dreams is a subtle exploration of adulthood, that uneasy realm between the expectations of youth and the fears of mounting responsibility. The book quietly surprises with graceful and unsettling images drawn deftly from domestic shadows. A book of both urgency and grace….”
—Press release, Archibald Lampman Award

 “In this luminous collection of poems, Deanna Young leads us down the chapters of a life, each chapter a place the body goes and the mind recalls… [a] life dreamed as much as lived…. It is poetry clothed in darkness but ignited from within by brilliant bursts of light.”
—Jury, Ottawa Book Awards

“Young challenges the divide between internal and external lives, allowing the subconscious mind to affect and inform conscious experience. Like the speaker in “Survivante,” we as readers are often “[c]aught by the gills, in a net / between worlds,” both aware of the fallibility of the images presented to us and afflicted by their power and momentum.”
—Brittany McGillivray, subTerrain

“Young’s rhythm and rhymes are subtle, her words carefully crafted to seem plain spoken and effortless…. In her poems, we recognize our innermost fears.”
—Donna Kane, Malahat Review

 “[Young’s] poems use storytelling, plain language and meticulous detail to bend the reader’s thinking inwards. They are mindful, probing pieces…”
—Rob Thomas, Apt613 

“So often in Deanna Young’s poems, what begins as a gentle game of the lyric imagination shifts mid-sentence into nightmare. Her lines can be beautiful, but her eye for fallibility (both human and material) is the book’s real trick. It will be re-read compulsively by its admirers.”
—Jacob McArthur Mooney

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Drunkard’s Path (Gaspereau Press 2001)

“Deanna Young has written a disarming collection which not only deftly threads original motifs through a range of disparate poems, but also possesses a welcome sense of the irony and humour present in almost all things.”
—Kimmy Beach, Sub Terrain

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The Still Before a Storm (Moonstone Press 1984)