![]() He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. Knopf, 2014), winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Knopf, 2018) and Book of Hours (Alfred A. ![]() 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.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries. Kevin Young's poetry collections include Brown (Alfred A. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. ![]() A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. ![]()
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