Brown

March 19, 2018
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.

April 1, 2018

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2018
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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)