An Inventory of Almost Everything

Author: Elizabeth Marie Young

Publisher: Subpress (2026)

In Young’s much-anticipated second poetry collection, the list form allows for the poetic embrace of a bewildering world that cannot be comprehended but can be endlessly explored as a catalogue of terrors, treasures and marvels. The poems in An Inventory of Almost Everything move back and forth, like the list form itself, between mundane reality and extravagant fantasy. They engage the form’s trajectory from Babylonian Star Catalogues to Buzzfeed’s “24 Tumblr Posts That Are Just Kind Of Weirdly Pure”. Here, the built-in rigidity of the form serves as a counterpoint to explorations of what is uncontainable and incomprehensible – consciousness, eroticism, spirituality. The list's incantatory force is harnessed to examine and resist the “powers” that attempt to contain and control contemporary bodies and minds: religion, science, technology, politics and the pervasive discourse of self-optimization.