Review by New York Times Review
KEVIN YOUNG'S NECESSARY new book of witness creates a parade through time, and I love a parade. Especially one with such good music - the poems in "Brown" dance through bebop and into James Brown's megafunk. Marching players include B. B. King and 01' Dirty Bastard. Sitting on that float decorated with bombed churches and flogged backs, baseball bats and basketballs, Fishbone records and railroad tracks, are Lead Belly and Howlin' Wolf playing dusty blues for Big Pun. The parade is coming all night, blowing up dust in the crossroads, churning with music, mad for music, swearing "I Would Die 4 U," grinning just a little so the initiated will feel the love burning like Jimi's guitar at Monterey. Scrappy kids dive into public pools and hit line drives with broken bats. Every line of "Brown" is aware that this storm must scare the hell out of people who have locked their doors and kneel before Fox News Channel asking God what went wrong. Young's book releases a universal shout - political in the best, most visceral way, critical, angry, squinting hard at this culture - while remaining at the same time deeply and lovingly personal. Love soars over every section, especially the most painful ones. Pain and joy. And baseball. And the delightful appearance of All's "rope-a-dope" move in the ring. Yeah, Young knows that move and throws punches when you look the other way. We are not expected just to watch. Put on your comfortable shoes - we have a long way to walk. Those who dare to enter the parade will understand the thrill of it when John Brown returns from the dead to smite slavers and lynchers. Yes, brown. Brown. The color of the earth itself. That fearsome color that in all its beautiful shades reigns over much of our planet. That color that makes us cry, "Build the wall." Makes us insist that "all lives matter" because those black lives... well. How inconvenient to be reminded we are all human beings. "When do you talk about it," Young writes, the men- never one - who come for you, burning & cutting & crossingeven a pistol can be made a whipjust for you saying what's true. But the Harlem Globetrotters suddenly join us. In Young's agile hands, they transform in shifting light from the clown princes of athletic humor into avatars of grace and a kind of satori: "Because on your finger / your knee, toes / & elbows the world can spin." Meadowlark Lemon is beatified in a testimonial born of deep respect. "Because mercy, not pity." Did I say this was a political screed? A radical's blurt of invective? Forget it. The Rev. Kevin Young has opened the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Lamentations, and he is here to pray. No fool he - Young is currently poetry editor at The New Yorker and director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He is the author of 10 books of poetry and two books of nonfiction, and the editor of several anthologies. Harvard graduate. Finalist for the National Book Award. Winner of a Guggenheim. Professor. I believe I saw him beat Colson Whitehead in a poker game a few years ago. Record geek. I suspect he could add a further title to his resumé: trickster. I can tell he knows that in barrios like my old one, the kids boasted, "I'm down and brown." Though they did not feel empowered in any way, their words made them taller and braver. Made them bold on mean streets and in barren dirt ball fields. "Ain't no shame in my game," their ghosts still shout. I don't know how he knows this. It's somewhere in his blood. He can hear them. He knows we used a long-dead cat for home base. Made believe we were Hank Aaron and hit a deflated soccer ball with a dinged wooden bat on the edge of a tidewater slough between a church and a slaughterhouse. In a fleet-footed baseball poem called "Stealing," he says: In that game called pickle, or hotbox, I rarely got caught. I ran like only the sly, four-eyed can - to get there & to get away- to reach somewhere safe, where I never thought to stay. The sly four-eyed poet knows there are precious few safe places. Knows that stealing sanctuary is what one gets in brown places. That one will not stay safe, because that is not possible. And the reader of course knows we're not talking just about baseball. That being said, I always thought B. H. Fairchild wrote the best baseball poems. But Young is opening a book that has no time for batting heroics or fulsome electrically lit baseball diamonds in approaching night. It's not just baseball either. The field grows crowded with Muhammad Ali, and an unlikely poetic hero in the swirl, Arthur Ashe. Joyous in its particulars, the collection knows a harrowing is coming. Trayvon Martin watches in the deep shadows, and Young is calling us to see him in "Triptych for Trayvon Martin": Because maybe Because we must say your names & the list grows longer & more endless I am writing this. The above is dedicated to Sandra Bland. Lest we forget: She was a 28-year-old African-American woman found hanged in her cell in Texas after being arrested during a traffic stop. Soon, the almost unbearable beauty and sorrow of "Whistle," which among other things reads as a prayerful lament for Emmett Till, arrives. Don't be afraid. Listen to the records. Even Robert Plant and Jim Carroll have come to play. Sinead O'Connor is shyly in a corner. Oh Lord, Jethro Tüll has been invited. It's a parade for all of us. Kevin Young loves you. That's why he sometimes gives you a kick. It's a rage that protects the most delicate observer's heart. Witness these last lines of the book. I actually held my breath for a moment and just let the stillness of these words do what had to be done after this immense journey. The poem is called "Hive." In it, a boy tries to rescue bees in his bare hands. Believing he can do it. Not unlike the poet himself, I suspect. A blessing. A forgiveness. These lines, then: Let him be right. Let the gods look away as always. Let this boy who carries the entire actual, whirring world in his calm unwashed hands, barely walking, bear us all there buzzing, unstung. LUIS ALBERTO URREA has written eight novels and five books of nonfiction in addition to his three poetry collections. His novel "The House of Broken Angels" was published in March.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 17, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Following his Carnegie Medal long-list nonfiction title Bunk (2017), Young's first poetry collection since Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015 (2016), opens with Thataway, in which a lynching propels a man to catch the Crescent Limited heading north, thus joining the Great Migration. Trains give momentum and rhythm to the lyrics that follow, which are organized into Home Recordings and Field Recordings. The first contains poems composed of gliding tercets spelling motion as Young evokes an American boyhood of baseball, friends, and family in Kansas, punctuated by racism. In the second section, the speaker heads out into the world, guided by James Brown, Prince, Public Enemy, and Fishbone. Thrillingly quick-footed, Young's poems are also formally intricate and fully loaded with history, protest, and emotion as he writes of racial injustice, a theme that crescendos in Repast, an oratorio performed at Carnegie Hall that honors Booker Wright, a courageous Mississippi barkeep, waiter, and civil rights activist. Joy and sorrow ride the rails, as in B. B. King Plays Oxford, Mississippi, in which Young describes the blues master's music as A poetry where Saturday night / meets Sunday morning. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Young (Bunk), director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor of the New Yorker, reflects on the varied nature and meanings of brownness in a typically ambitious collection that honors black culture and struggle. The title sequence is the collection's highlight; Young recalls memories of the Topeka church of his youth-"where Great/ Aunts keep watch,/ their hair shiny// as our shoes"-while addressing its intimate connection to Brown v. Board of Education. Personal, historic, and contemporary confrontations with white supremacy, such as "Triptych for Trayvon Martin," feature prominently. In the stirring oratorio "Repast," the voice of Mississippi barkeep, activist, and waiter Booker Wright, murdered in 1966, rings out: "I lay down and I dream about what I had// to go through with." In more celebratory poems, Young pays homage to numerous groundbreaking black athletes and musicians, including the unheralded band Fishbone, whose "black grooves gave/ way to moans/ of horns, yelps,// bass that leapt." And he goes big in the double sonnet crown "De La Soul Is Dead," in which his college years mirror hip-hop's golden age, though a tighter single crown probably would suffice. The book's profusion of detail and consistency of form are arguably both overwhelming and necessary; Young is writing through moments of the exemplary and mundane-"we breathe,/ we grieve, we drink/ our tidy drinks"-for himself and his community alike. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Following closely on Young's omnibus retrospective, Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, this new collection continues and deepens the poet's lyrical exploration of the African American cultural influences (Hank Aaron, James Brown, Mohammed Ali) who shaped his-and the nation's-identity. Through short, spare lines that dance, chime, laugh, lament, and assert, Young creates a consciousness-in-motion, a weaving of personal and national histories that not only reanimates the past but moves forcefully into the present. From his own experiences of prejudice ("our racist neighbor/ wouldn't let me spin/ on her swing set") and institutional whitewash (a U.S. history class that "spent the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts,/ barely a March on Washington"), Young moves on to empathic elegies for Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and other victims of racial violence ("Because we must/ say your names/ & the list grows/ longer & more/ endless/ I am writing this"). VERDICT A richly envisioned memoir in verse ("Once you start how can you quit/ all this remembering?") offering a wide-ranging yet intimate account of growing up in a country that has yet to live up to its promises.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
