Award-winning poet C. Dale Young, a 1991 Boston College graduate, has released his latest poetry collection—described as a “tour de force”—Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems (Four Ways Books, 2025). From the publisher: “As a tenured artist and veteran doctor, Young writes with a dual awareness of life’s fragility and the lyric’s endurance, presenting readers with new work that is entirely fresh even as it speaks to his broader legacy and dialogues with his preceding oeuvre. …[T]hese poems explore the author’s simultaneous embrace of mortality’s richness and resignation to death’s inevitable decay. Young surveys the perpetual ultimatum of his roles: as an oncologist, the patients (including his parents) he couldn’t save; as an artist, the self he intends to confront honestly as his body ages; and, as a mortal raised with stories of the Taino gods, the impossibility of building the perfect animal.” Young is the author of The Affliction, a novel in stories, and the poetry collections The Day Underneath the Day; The Second Person, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; Torn, named one of the best poetry collections of 2011 by National Public Radio; The Halo, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; and Prometeo.