Ardency by
Acclaimed poet Kevin Young gathers here a chorus of voices that tells the story of the Africans who mutinied onboard the slave ship Amistad. Written over twenty years, this poetic epic—part libretto, part captivity epistle—makes the past present, and even its sorrows sing. In “Buzzard,” the opening section, we hear from the African interpreter for the rebels, mostly from Sierra Leone, who were captured on their winding attempt to sail home and were jailed in New Haven. In “Correspondance,” we encounter the remarkable letters to John Quincy Adams and others that the captives write from jail, where abolitionists taught them English while converting them to Christianity. In lines profound and pointed, the men demand their freedom in their newfound tongue: “All we want is make us free.” The book culminates in “Witness,” a libretto chanted by Cinque, the rebel leader, who yearns for his family and freedom while eloquently evoking the Amistads’ conversion and life in “Merica.” As Young conjures this array of history and music, interweaving the liberation cry of Negro spirituals and the indoctrinating wordplay of American primers, he delivers his signature songlike immediacy at the service of a tremendous epic built on the ironies, violence, and virtues of American history. Vivid and true, Ardency is a powerful meditation on who we’ve been and who we are.
Book of Hours by
A beautiful book of both grief and birth from the award-winning poet whose work thrills his audience with its immediate emotional impact and musical riffs. A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of the poet's father, we witness the unfolding of his grief. "In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor," he tells us, in one of the collection's piercing two-line poems. Young captures the strange silence of bereavement- "Not the storm/ but the calm/ that slays me." But the poet acknowledges, even celebrates, life's passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence describing the birth of his son- in "Crowning," he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing "her face/ full of fire, then groaning your face/ out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air." Ending this book of birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking "What good//are wishes if they aren't/ used up?" while understanding "How to listen/ to what's gone."
Black Maria by
Kevin Young follows his acclaimed exploration of the blues in Jelly Roll with another playful riff on a vital art form, giving readers a film noir in verse. Charming, funky, bleak, humorous, picaresque, and full of pathos, Black Maria is brimming with originality and stark lyricism.
To Repel Ghosts by
Revamped from its original "double album" version of 350 pages into this unique "remix," To Repel Ghosts captures the dynamic work and brief life of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In spare, jazzlike verse Kevin Young tells the story of Basquiat's rise from the mock prophet and graffiti artist SAMO to one of the hottest painters of the 1980s ("blue-chip Basquiat / playing the bull / market"), exploring the artist's bouts with fame and heroin, mourning his untimely death, and celebrating his legacy. Along the way Young riffs on Basquiat's paintings and sayings, on the music he loved, on the artists he ran with (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, among them), and on the black heroes (Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Billie Holiday) who inspired him. Young's poetic channeling of Basquiat--a jostling, poignant brand of downtownspeak--makes for an urban epic in the tradition of Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred." To Repel Ghosts, along with Young's Jelly Roll: A Blues and Black Maria, his recent book of film noir verse, forms an American trilogy--Devil's Music--that explores other art forms through poetry. In its creation, Yound has become a poet whose work speaks both for and beyond his genre, with a music all its own.
Dear Darkness by
Delivered in Young's classic bluesy tone, this powerful collection of poems about the American family, smoky Southern food, and the losses that time inevitably brings "bristles with life, nerve and, best of all, wit" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Jelly Roll by
In this jaunty and intimate collection, Kevin Young invents a language as shimmying and comic, as low-down and high-hearted, as the music from which he draws inspiration. With titles such as “Stride Piano,” “Gutbucket,” and “Can-Can,” these poems have the sharp completeness of vocalized songs and follow a classic blues trajectory: praising and professing undying devotion (“To watch you walk / cross the room in your black / corduroys is to see / civilization start”), only to end up lamenting the loss of love (“No use driving / like rain, past / where you at”). As Young conquers the sorrow left on his doorstep, the poems broaden to embrace not just the wisdom that comes with heartbreak but the bittersweet wonder of triumphing over adversity at all. Sexy and tart, playfully blending an African American idiom with traditional lyric diction, Young’s voice is pure American: joyous in its individualism and singing of the self at its strongest. From the Hardcover edition.
Most Way Home by
Encompassing America's African-American landscape and rich oral histories of the South, this poetry collection centers on the concept of "home" and explores conflicts between black and white, North and South, ancestral and modern.
