In 1983, at the coaxing of the literary elder, Meridel LeSueur, Shadow Press, USA published Timothy Young’s long broadside of poetry, Men Don't Dance in America, one of the early anthems of the then-budding men's movement. This long rhythmic celebration was the first of many poems Young published, recorded or performed over thirty years. This collection, TO THE PALACE OF KINGS includes The Mississippi Book of the Dead, eighty stanzas which “channel midlife unrest into a kind of pan-heartland pilgrimage, transforming mundane observations of place into a numinous whole.” Also included are the poems 'Frogtown, the Low Place,' enhanced from a television documentary script; 'Mississippi Ecstasy,' 'In the Woods at the Far Eighty,' and 'Piano Concerto,' poems used for musical scores by composer Daniel Cavanagh; 'In the Puki Puki Pu,' a children’s rhyme for his toddler son; political street poems such as 'Where Frogtown Meets Rondotown'; the tour-de-force 'Homage for Whitman'; and 'Singing in the Palace of Kings,' a paean celebrating the soul of men who sing together.

Music and the power of poetic expression have been the performance signatures of Timothy Young and here is a collection of his long and longer poems—from Men Don’t Dance in America (1983) to The Mississippi Book of the Dead (2013)—thirty years’ worth of soulful grief and joy.