Brown
Subtitle: poems
By: Kevin Young ; photographs by Melanie Dunea
Contributors: Dunea, Melanie, photographer
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 161
ISBN-13: 9781524732547
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: African Americans; Poetry
Description: Divided 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. From "History"--A song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. 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. These twenty-eight 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. A testament to Young's own--and our collective--experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time"--
Notes: "This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.
Table of contents: title: Home recordings; title: One: the A train; title: Two: on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe; title: Field recordings; title: Three: night train; title: Four: the Crescent Unlimited.