Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize (Fence Books, 2009) won the 2009 Fence Motherwell Prize. Lyn Hejinian describes the collection as “an enormous achievement—the creation of language-lavish landscapes in which the imagination is never exhausted.” Young received a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and is assistant professor of Classics at Wellesley College, where she teaches Latin, Greek, and English poetry. Young is also the author of the chapbook Sonnets (Omahrahu, 2008), which is “patterned,” critic Ange Mlinko comments, “after Shakespearean sonnets (in iambic pentameter, even!), but their mocking, lascivious mix of dictions makes them, well, perverse … she’ll reference ‘algorithmic suburbs’ and microorganisms, smilax and ocelot, Goya and Aristotle, Thebes and the Macarena (she is a Greek and Latin scholar, besides being young and impertinent).”

Recorded Thursday, June 2, 2011 at Northwestern University.