Shipping Weight:
.721|Dimensions:
6.1 x 1.2 x 9 inches
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Description
Now in paperback, from the award-winning author of Jelly Roll and Book of Hours, 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from all nine of Kevin Young's previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems.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."
About the Author
Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author ofMost Way Home,To Repel Ghosts,Jelly Roll,Black Maria,For The Confederate Dead,Dear Darkness, and editor ofGiant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers;Blues Poems; Jazz PoemsandJohn Berryman's Selected Poems.His Black Cat Blues, originally published inThe Virginia Quarterly Review, was included inThe Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has appeared inThe New Yorker,Poetry Magazine,The Paris Review,Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue ofPloughshares. He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.His 2003 book of poemsJelly Rollwas a finalist for the National Book Award.After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.
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