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  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9780345807410
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Blue Laws

Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015

  • Kevin Young




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.

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from all nine of Kevin Young's previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems.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."

  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9780345807410
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Praise for Blue Laws

  • "Blue Laws demonstrates why Kevin Young is one of the most important poets of his generation." --Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
  • "Read as a whole, [Blue Laws] tells a story about how history has been written on African-American bodies, and imagines the voices that have spoken back . . . Young is a relaxed lyricist, precise without being precious, and he expresses enormous feeling with great economy. He's a natural storyteller." --Harper's Magazine
  • "One of the most important books of the year in any category." --Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire
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