When the Wolves Quit

Drama. "In Joshua Young's WHEN THE WOLVES QUIT, the palpable influences of cinema and surrealism are woven together in this luminous play-in-verse. The firing of a gun triggers this emotional investigation of faith, memory, and the afterlife. With the same ferocity of a fired bullet Young's work accelerates the reader through his poetic obsession where the woods are ghostly and the path through the thicket is somewhere off the stage. With ingenuity and his strong gifts as a...
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Drama. "In Joshua Young's WHEN THE WOLVES QUIT, the palpable influences of cinema and surrealism are woven together in this luminous play-in-verse. The firing of a gun triggers this emotional investigation of faith, memory, and the afterlife. With the same ferocity of a fired bullet Young's work accelerates the reader through his poetic obsession where the woods are ghostly and the path through the thicket is somewhere off the stage. With ingenuity and his strong gifts as a storyteller, Joshua Young's tale invites readers to become major characters and to explore a place that is the "middle ground between closure and myth."—Oliver de la Paz

"Long after reading it, Joshua Young's WHEN THE WOLVES QUIT still sits on my chest heavy as stone, lapping at my throat with a sometimes tongue and the always threat of teeth. When I scream blood-lust for new words, this book is what I greedily nightmare about."—J. A. Tyler

"A remarkable and delightful full-length debut, Joshua Young's WHEN THE WOLVES QUIT is a poetic Lynchian noir unlike any poetry before. Interrogating a familiar, provincial American space where 'secrets are damp, / caught in the space between the throat and the front teeth,' Young entices us to step onto the stage itself. ENTER STAGE LEFT: someone disappears. ENTER STAGE RIGHT: see the missing through a keyhole—or worse, through the slats of your neighbor's nearly closed blinds. Brilliantly suppressing distinctions between poetry, drama, and fiction, here is a frightening polyphony of voices, where all become victims of their own crimes—where 'suffering moves and breathes.' The smallest details are even more disturbing, such as an out of tune piano plinking over the debris of other people's lives in half-abandoned rooms. When told in the book this is dream, we think nightmare. Most worryingly, Young manages to implicate an audience who is much too titillated by the oblique violence happening offstage. Just try to remove yourself from that association, reader."—Richard Greenfield