Darlene Young

Years before her first poetry collection, Homespun and Angel Feathers, published in 2019, Darlene Young was already one of my favorite Mormon poets. She’s wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove: a poet who offers simple moments packed with seismic insight. Her poem “Kintsukuroi for Joseph Smith,” which was featured in the Center Gallery’s exhibit Great Awakening, should be required reading for Latter-day Saints in the information age. But her most-circulated piece, passed around at ward activities (and apparently also among temple workers between shifts), is probably “Angels of Mercy,” a narrative poem about Relief Society leaders discussing whether to offer meals to a sister and her family as she recovers from surgery. “It seems precedent was vague,” the poem notes. “No one was sure whether ‘boob job’ qualified as a legitimate call for aid.”

Thanks to The Season, I got an advance copy of Young’s forthcoming second collection, Here. In the book’s opening poem, “Investigative Journalism,” Young vows to seek God in the small things, like “in the sunrise of this morning, and in the hallelujahs of the dang magpies waking me to it.” Recurring motifs of Adam and Eve entering the lone and dreary world and Young teaching her sons to shovel neighbors’ snow in their suburban Salt Lake ward give a sense of narrative shape and forward momentum to the volume. The range of her gifts is once again on display as she speaks as mother and mystic, soccer mom and saint. In an echo of Moroni, she leaves a record of what she has seen and what she awaits. We couldn’t ask for a better chronicler: I’m glad Darlene Young decided to write in our language and for our people. — James Goldberg (Here by Darlene Young debuts on April 4.)