About this item
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. "In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor," he tells us, in one of the collection's piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement ("Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me"), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life's passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about 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 both 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.
About the Author
Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Dear Darkness, named one of the Best Books of 2008 by National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and winner of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award in poetry. His book Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and the Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems. The curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Young lives in Boston and Atlanta.
