Brown
Poems
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection.
“Vital and sophisticated ... sinks hooks into you that cannot be easily removed.” —The New York Times
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
