Laurie Saurborn Young is the author of Carnavoria (2012) and a limited-edition chapbook, Patriot (2013). Winner of an NEA fellowship in poetry, Saurborn Young currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Books by Laurie Saurborn Young:

Other poems on the web by Laurie Saurborn Young:
Two poems
Six poems
Two poems
Three poems
Two poems

Laurie Saurborn Young's Blog.

Laurie Saurborn Young's Website.

Laurie Saurborn Young According to Wikipedia.

Laurie Saurborn Young on Twitter.

About Industry of Brief Distraction:

"As Wordsworth's 'The World Is Too Much With Us' is to nineteenth-century England, so Laurie Saurborn Young's Industry of Brief Distraction to twenty-first century America: a lamentation over the ways—and over the fact that—'we lay waste our powers.' This is America, how we take and what we have, seen with more precision and particularity than is comfortable, from 'the closed-captioned words You little / Bitch on the gym TV' to impossible-to-shake plastic horses. 'Setting a willow afire I recall who // we are,' the speaker declares in one of Saurborn Young's poems, and these pages are the leaves of that burning willow."
—H. L. Hix

"Madly inventive and wildly original, Industry of Brief Distraction swerves from the dumpster of America in the 'Patriot' poems to the highjinks of plastic horses. If Laurie Saurborn Young's diction doesn't seduce you, industry will surrender its bricks. The poems move at a pace that is puzzling—at once gorgeously slow and blazingly fast. Who knew poetry could be clouds and dreams and still throw you onto the sidewalk? Read this book and be wowed."
—Barbara Ras

"Clear-sighted and with an easy access to the wild, weird American idiom, the poems in Laurie Saurborn Young's Industry of Brief Distraction reveal, often all at once, the many different flavors and implications of our language. Sometimes brutal, always stunning, often very funny, this collection is made of newness and variety. Yes, there is gravity to Saurborn Young's subjects—America, sex, death, violence, sexual violence, the degradation of the natural world—yet again and again her poems take flight. There is a pure joy in watching them soar."
—Carrie Fountain