“American Bison” captures such a Wordsworthian “spot of time”:

The fact that both these touchstones took place in Kansas, where Young was mostly raised, provides the poet with invitations to explore the intersection of his personal growth with this regional history. The Board of Education, as well as the violent abolitionist insurrection of John Brown. Beyond skin color, it also evokes historical moments and personages connected to race, such as the landmark segregation case of Brown vs. The title Brown is full of possible associations and meanings. Young’s poetry on social issues tempers a tragic sense of outrage with a blues-based ethos which, as Young points out in a recent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is “embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston … sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as ‘an act of resistance.’” In these poems, the expression of “hard-earned joy” in the face of unspeakable injustice is an ennobling challenge.īrown is not just a socially-aware autobiography in verse, but a consciously emblematic exploration of how cultural and historical forces shape personal identity, and how, in turn, the growing consciousness of a poet critiques that formative culture. In its progression toward a more experienced vision, this brilliant and moving collection is structured as a coming-of-age chronicle. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” shadowed recollections of boyhood, and culminating with “Field Recordings,” somber reflections on the recurring traumas of African American social history. In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son.

Book of Hours by Kevin Young