pheromones

pheromones by Mark Young is a wide-ranging collection of visual poetry in which words, images, typography, collage, color, and abstraction continually interact. Published by Sandy Press in 2026, the book moves freely between minimalist word constructions, digitally manipulated photographs, geometric abstraction, found imagery, and text-image collage. Young treats language not simply as something to be read but as visual material: words are displaced, fragmented, condensed, repeated, erased, or placed in unexpected relationships with images. Pieces such as "The Tenth Word," "A Small Fugue," "Bashō Condensed," "divulge," and "Einsteinium" demonstrate how a few words, or even individual letters, can generate associations that move simultaneously through poetry, humor, philosophy, and graphic form.

Throughout pheromones, Young draws upon an unusually broad field of cultural references. Samuel Beckett becomes the basis of the comic "Beckett List," which transforms titles such as The Unnameable, Krapp's Last Tape, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Watt into a sequence of works involving "Uber." Elsewhere, the book invokes or plays with Bashō, Bach, Burroughs, Rembrandt, Saint John of the Cross, de Chirico, Goya, Rauschenberg, Whistler, Man Ray, Philip K. Dick, and figures from popular culture. These references are rarely straightforward homages. Instead, Young subjects cultural history to punning, substitution, juxtaposition, fragmentation, and visual transformation, allowing high art, literature, music, popular culture, and everyday language to occupy the same imaginative space.

The collection is also notable for its sequences, which give the book a larger structural rhythm. "The Calculations" develops a related visual vocabulary through "abacus," "Burroughs," "computation," "proration," and "substitution." Another sequence, "Scenes from the lives of the pepper trees," takes its overall title and the titles of its individual pieces from a poem by Denise Levertov: "Cats are stretching in the doorways," "Berries of modest red," "Marimba, marimba - from beyond the black street," "Let him sleep," and "Will he wake?"