These thirty-two taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi 'barkeep, activist, waiter' Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle 'De La Soul Is Dead,' about the days when hip-hop was growing up ('we were black then, not yet / African American'), remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story.Ī testament to Young's own-and our collective-experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time. W., who gave his students 'the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington'-to 'Money Road,' a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's lynching, the poems engage place and the past and their intertwined power.

sinks hooks into you that cannot be easily removed.” - The New York Timesĭivided into 'Home Recordings' and 'Field Recordings,' Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times.įrom 'History'-a song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. Kevin Young on Brown: Poems at the 2018 Miami Book Fair interviewed by Ashley Ford. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things 'brown' in this powerful new collection. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things 'brown' in this powerful new collection. KEVIN YOUNG is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor for The New Yorker.He is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award and Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy.

Brown by Kevin Young