Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015

by Kevin Young

Overview

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A rich and lively gathering of highlights from the first twenty years of an extraordinary career, interspersed with “B sides” and “bonus tracks” from this prolific and widely acclaimed poet.

Blue Laws gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young’s previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut (Most Way Home, 1995) and the amazing “double album” life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, “remixed” for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003) and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness (2008) and Book of Hours (2014), this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting. Together with wonderful outtakes and previously unseen blues, the profoundly felt poems here of family, Southern food, and loss are of a piece with the depth of personal sensibility and humanity found in his Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels or bold sequences such as “The Ballad of Jim Crow” and a new “Homage to Phillis Wheatley.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101946947
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/02/2016
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	608
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

KEVIN YOUNG is the author of ten books of poetry, including Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, winner of a 2012 American Book Award; and Jelly Roll: A Blues, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the editor of The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink and seven other collections. His book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won the PEN Open Book Award. He is currently the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of both Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Editorial Reviews

Blue Laws celebrates black cultural traditions with the swagger of a prizefighter stepping into the ring…Incorporating poetic sequences on a range of historical figures—the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the colonial-era poet Phillis Wheatley, the Amistad slave mutineers—as well as blues poems, odes to soul food and an imaginary black film noir in couplets, Blue Laws could serve as a sourcebook for African-American Studies 101.

The New York Times Book Review - Srikanth Reddy

02/15/2016
In this extensive and impressive selected volume that also includes a generous helping of unpublished poems, poet and critic Young, winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Prize for Book of Hours, puts his characteristically succinct narrative lines on full display as he crafts voices that speak to the pleasures and pains of African-American lives, including his own. Young demonstrates a deft skill for persona, taking on the voices of such historical figures as Jack Johnson, the great 20th-century boxer, and Cinque, the leader of the Amistad rebels. Music, especially blues, jazz, and hip-hop, moves as both an undertone and overtone throughout the book. Young shows his mastery of form throughout—particularly in “Urgent Telegram to Jean-Michel Basquiat”—while his love poems display a tremendous ear and the talent for turning stock images into moving metaphors: “Even a bird,/ a dog, got him a cage// he can bark/ all night in, or sing.” Some poems feel more concerned with flexing their muscles than engaging the reader, and metaphors can seem redundant (not altogether surprising, given Young’s prolific output), especially in a series of odes to foods. Yet Young also offers stunning confessional lines that will move the reader with their lyrical starkness, as in a heartrending series of elegies for his father: “The day will come// when you’ll be dead longer/ than alive.” (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

“Young is one of the most important poets of his generation. Encompassing 20 years of his work, the collection draws from and deepens the African American poetic tradition. Young brilliantly conveys the struggles and triumphs of those oppressed by slavery, economic hardship after emancipation, Jim Crow laws and prejudice that still tinge life today…Tremendous depth and breadth…builds toward the gorgeous work from 'Book of Hours,' where the speaker deals with the loss of his father and his own impending parenthood.”
—Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post
 
“Young has become one of the poetry stars of his generation.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher, Los Angeles Times
 
“Extensive and impressive…Young crafts voices that speak to the pleasures and pains of African-American lives, including his own…[his] often stunning confessional lines…will move the reader with their lyric starkness.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

09/01/2015
While a student at Harvard, Young joined the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers; his first book of poetry, Most Way Home (1995), was selected for the National Poetry Series, while 2003's Jelly Roll was a National Book Award finalist and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. This hefty volume ranges over his 20-year career.

Library Journal