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Summary
Summary
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 thirty-two 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.
Author Notes
KEVIN YOUNG is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and was recently named poetry editor for The New Yorker . He is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including Blue Laws- Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, long-listed for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His collection Jelly Roll- A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His nonfiction book The Grey Album- On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the editor of eight other collections, the author of a forthcoming nonfiction book on the rise of hoaxes and fake news in American life, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Reviews (4)
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.
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
New York Review of Books 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.
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.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Brown for my mother The scrolled brown arms of the church pews curve like a bone--their backs bend us upright, standing as the choir enters singing, We've come this far by faith-- the steps & sway of maroon robes, hands clap like a heart in its chest-- leaning on the Lord-- this morning's program still warm from the mimeo machine quick becomes a fan. In the vestibule latecomers wait just outside the music--the river we crossed to get here-- wide boulevards now * in disrepair. We're watched over in the antechamber by Rev. Oliver Brown, his small, colored picture nailed slanted to the wall--former pastor of St. Mark's who marched into that principal's office in Topeka to ask why can't my daughter school here, just steps from our house-- but well knew the answer-- & Little Linda became an idea, became more what we needed & not a girl no more-- Free-dom Free-dom-- * Now meant sit-ins & I shall I shall I shall not be moved-- & four little girls bombed into tomorrow in a church basement like ours where nursing mothers & children not ready to sit still learned to walk--Sunday school sent into pieces & our arms. We are swaying more now, entering heaven's rolls--the second row behind the widows in their feathery hats & empty nests, heads heavy but not hearts Amen . The all-white * stretchy, scratchy dresses of the missionaries-- the hatless holy who pin lace to their hair--bowing down into pocketbooks opened for the Lord, then snapped shut like a child's mouth mouthing off, which just one glare from an elder could close. God's eyes must be like these--aimed at the back row where boys pass jokes & glances, where Great Aunts keep watch, their hair shiny as our shoes &, as of yesterday, just as new-- * chemical curls & lop- sided wigs--humming during offering Oh my Lord Oh my Lordy What can I do. The pews curve like ribs broken, barely healed, & we can feel ourselves breathe-- while Mrs. Linda Brown Thompson, married now, hymns piano behind her solo-- No finer noise than this-- We sing along, or behind, mouth most every word--following her grown, glory voice, the black notes * rising like we do-- like Deacon Coleman who my mother always called Mister -- who'd help her weekends & last I saw him my mother offered him a slice of sweet potato pie as payment-- or was it apple-- he'd take no money barely said Yes, only I could stay for a piece -- trim as his grey moustache, he ate with what I can only call dignity-- fork gently placed * across his emptied plate. Afterward, full, Mr. Coleman's That's nice meant wonder, meant the world entire. Within a year cancer had eaten him away-- the only hint of it this bitter taste for a whole year in his mouth. The resurrection and the light. For now he's still standing down front, waiting at the altar for anyone to accept the Lord, rise & he'll meet you halfway & help you down the aisle-- legs grown weak-- As it was in the beginning Is now * And ever shall be-- All this tuning & tithing. We offer our voices up toward the windows whose glass I knew as colored, not stained-- our backs made upright not by the pews alone-- the brown wood smooth, scrolled arms grown warm with wear-- & prayer-- Tell your neighbor next to you you love them-- till we exit into the brightness beyond the doors. Excerpted from Brown: Poems by Kevin Young All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Thataway | p. 3 |
| Home Recordings | |
| 1 The A Train | |
| Swing | p. 9 |
| Rumble in the Jungle | p. 11 |
| Open Letter to Hank Aaron | p. 13 |
| Mercy Rule | p. 15 |
| Slump | |
| Stealing | |
| Patter | |
| Flame Tempered | |
| Practice | |
| The Division | |
| Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters | p. 26 |
| Ashe | p. 27 |
| Shirts & Skins | p. 29 |
| I doubt it | p. 33 |
| 2 On The Atchison, Topeka & The Santa Fe | |
| Ad Astra Per Aspera | p. 37 |
| Western Meadowlark | |
| American Bison | |
| Sunflower | |
| Phys. Ed. | p. 42 |
| Warm Up | |
| Tumbling | |
| Dodgeball | |
| Bleachers | |
| Practice | |
| City | |
| Ice Storm, 1984 | p. 50 |
| History | p. 53 |
| Dictation | p. 58 |
| Booty Green | p. 59 |
| Brown | p. 65 |
| Field Recordings | |
| 3 Night Train | |
| James Brown at B. B. King's on New Year's Eve | p. 77 |
| Fishbone | p. 78 |
| Chuck Taylor All Stars | |
| Checkerboard Vans | |
| Creepers | |
| DocMartens | |
| John Fluevogs | |
| Lead Belly's First Grave | p. 86 |
| It | p. 88 |
| Ode to Big Pun | p. 89 |
| De La Soul Is Dead | p. 90 |
| Ode to OL Dirty Bastard | p. 114 |
| 4 The Crescent Limited | |
| B. B. King Plays Oxford, Mississippi | p. 119 |
| Bass | p. 120 |
| Triptych for Trayvon Martin | p. 121 |
| Not Guilty (A Frieze for Sandra Bland) | |
| Limbo (A Fresco for Tamir Rice) | |
| Nightstick (A Mural for Michael Brown) | |
| A Brown Atlanta Boy Watches Basketball on West 4th. Meanwhile, Neo-Nazis March on Charlottesville, Virginia | p. 126 |
| Howlin' Wolf | p. 128 |
| Repast | p. 131 |
| Hospitality Blues | |
| The Head Waiter's Lament | |
| Reservations | |
| Booker's Place | |
| Waiting | |
| Death's Dictionary | |
| A Glossary of Uppity | |
| Pining, A Definition | |
| Sundaying | |
| Whistle | p. 147 |
| Money Road | p. 148 |
| Hive | p. 156 |
| Notes & Acknowledgments | p. 159 |