"A child hears things in strange ways and keeps whispering to the adult of how things seem to be, keeping alive rumors of a mythical gift-giver, ignoring the martyrdom. Good poets get to work in just such riddled spaces, and Joe Deany-Braun's new collection, Young Santa, brings together saint and Santa in a way I could never have guessed at before reading this thin, quietly astonishing book. In a stanzaic form invented by the poet Jack Collom-a variant of Robert Kelly's "lune" form-comprised of three/five/three-word tercets, Deany-Braun upends our inherited sense of Santa as jolly giver of half-deserved joys. Far from the red-nosed, portly elder tipsy on his own generosity, Young Santa cuts the lean figure of an ascetic mystic, more Jain than djinn, closer to a stoic philosopher than to the stuff of our childhood dreams." - Dan Beachy-Quick, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A saint of poetry." - Anne Waldman

"Whimsical and poignant." - Jennifer Huang

"Worthy of Bashō or Dōgen." - David Mutschlecner