Andy Young’s new poetry collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2024), is a curation of the suffering of the world, a lamentation both personal and political restrained by the hush one is required to maintain in an art exhibition, or the hush in the pew in the church where the walls are covered with the iconography of martyrdom. The martyrs Young depicts are placid, much as medieval saint icons appear placid while being tortured. The depictions in this new book are indeed placid, but we, the readers, are moved at moments to the point where we might wail.

Museum of the Soon to Depart finds a Baudelairean “correspondence” between the imagery of the intimate, personal suffering of the poet’s mother—even of her autopsy—and the political suffering of the whole exploited world. This book visits old sites of suffering—in Spain, we find in the poem “Bomb Shelter, Plaça del Diamant, Barcelona,” a curation of fascist war: “…two to three bombardments per week the guide tells / us I scribble his words down, little metal doves.”

The role of the collection’s narrator, and perhaps by extension, the reader, is to bear witness, to note, to learn in the midst of the unthinkable—but what can we really learn in the spectacle of suffering, particularly when that suffering is the vivid suffering of one’s own dying mother? Can there ever be a lesson in such suffering, a pious meditatio Christi that allows the witness to become somehow more perfected in the Refiner’s fire of anguish?

In her poem “My Mother’s Skull is Opened the First Time,” Young offers us a terse inventory and something of a homily:

     post-surgery scan shows inflammation a gray sea around

     a dark emptiness
     hole where tumor lodged size of a child’s fist
     shoving out frontal lobe tissue where lives personality

     higher level cog native functioning no way to excise
     pathology says tentacles return no matter standard. 

     of care or candles lit at St. Jude’s shrine my mother’s devout she 
          touches her beads still takes the wafer wears lipstick with

     her headband of staples.

In this poem, the reader finds the mother at the shrine and the mother enshrined. We find the minimalist signs of suffering, the placid holy martyr devoutly submitted—not so much to the pain, but rather to the purpose of depictions of suffering in Catholic images of the crown of thorns—to propitiate peace, to cleanse the whole, cruel world with the sacrifice of the pious.

Yet more provocative in this collection, perhaps, is the role in which the reader is placed—not as executioner, nor as martyr, but as witness to the world’s suffering that perhaps we might be provoked to some kind of post-modern penitence. This collection is an inventory of other people’s suffering—what will the reader do to end it?

Young writes a cycle of ekphrastic poems about the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, whose photographs document the toiling suffering of working people in the developing world. In these images, she finds holy mysteries, the sacrifice of something: of what? to what? Perhaps we, the spectator, wonder with her. We find, for instance, in “Raw Wool at Kustanai Textile Processing Plant” such an ekphrastic koan:

     She seems to be holding A child

     At the breast

     But no

     It’s the wool she walks through,

     And that’s wool Spilling
     From her thick arms…
     Inside the wool surrounding her: faces Reduced to soft blurs faces of 
          bodies falling
     Of sudden violence
     Of ones who died

     In the middle of living

     With no signs except
 
     Intricate symmetries surrounding us.

Museum of the Soon to Depart implicates us in an era where fewer and fewer of us understand the suffering bodies of icons in churches to be a tool for honing our characters. We are in a gallery, surely, placidly observing those who suffer in images where they themselves do not cry out, but instead seem peaceful. And yet, this collection calls us to action, to reject the very passivity these images suggest. Who are we in the face of the world’s suffering? Is it futile to try to assuage the pain? In some cases, we are indeed helpless or too far away to arrive in time to rescue anyone. Andy Young has written a collection that curates a world from which we must not look away. In its post-modernity, it does not quite exhort us to action, but if we do not respond as citizens of our times—act, feed the poor, find a living wage for workers, find cures, offer an efficacious prayer (or at least one laden with deep compassion), we are complicit with suffering in a manner most of us would not wish to remain.

Andy Young, Museum of the Soon to Depart, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Oct. 2024, 88 pages, $20.00, paper