Because We Must: A Memoir (winner of the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction, forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press, March 2025)
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Boy
CavanKerry Press, 2023
One Bird a Day
Kelsay Books, 2018
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Growing Big
North Star Press, 2013
Contact me for a copy (see About Me page)
Driving to Heaven
Parallel Press, 2010
Contact me for copies (see About Me page)
Praise for Because We Must:
Life changes on a dime, as Joan Didion pointed out in her classic grief memoir, THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, a book that comes to mind when reading BECAUSE WE MUST, a mother’s clear-eyed yet agonized guide to what it was like to almost lose her young (in his twenties) son to the very definition of a senseless accident. . .On one level, Because We Must offers practical tips to anyone wanting to help . . .the abiding value of Because We Must is its tribute to Elias who is amazing.
Judge Madeleine Blais
Praise for Boy:
“Defiantly observant, fiercely intelligent, the speaker of this book-length sequence is the preteen middle sister watching her family crumble. . . Youngblom pulls no punches here. In her thoroughly engrossing narrative, we find not elegy, but the powerful and intimate chronicle of a woman seeking answers.” Annie Kim, author of Eros, Unbroken and Into the Cyclorama
“When Tracy Youngblom is a child herself, her younger brother dies, in a quick and utterly random accident. And then—the world goes on. . . Somehow Youngblom creates poems that are both unflinching and exquisite—just please read this book, you will never forget it.”
Kirsten Dierking, author of One Red Eye, Northern Oracle, and Tether
Read a review of Boy, by Michael Collins, in Atticus Review:
Praise for One Bird a Day:
“Fine poets, such as Tracy Youngblom, let the world work upon them and become the instrument of their own observations. In One Bird a Day, Youngblom beautifully exercises her instrument through a year of watching birds, in search of “What we all/long for—one glimpse of the possible/beauty we leave behind.”
Tim Nolan, author of The Field and And Then
“Her hard-won, perfectly balanced poems do more than merely render the observed world: as we stand watching with her, layer after layer of insight, association, and meaning emerge.”
James Silas Rogers, author of The Collector of Shadows and Northern Orchards: Places Near the Dead
Praise for Growing Big:
“I’ve felt for a long time that the poem “Growing Big” is one of the finest poems about parents, a poem driven by an essential understanding of an old fairy tale, then complicated by the careful thinking and feeling and image-making of Tracy Youngblom. The book. . . is a powerful look at gender, with poems that ask every reader to consider their own relationships with the powerful men and women, boys and girls, in their lives, a book of poems so beautifully written we live and breathe inside the poet’s memories as if they are our own.”
Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems and nine other collections
“These fiercely honest, funny, beautifully-wrought poems rage and rejoice in the face of mystery, above all the cruel and tender mysteries of family and love. Their compressed narratives and startling juxtapositions explore the tangles of imagination and desire that bind us to one another and hold us apart.”
Lon Otto, professor of English, University of St. Thomas
Read two reviews of Driving to Heaven: