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  • Published: 4 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529939927
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

Night Watch




A haunting poetry collection about community, nationhood and resilience – from the T.S. Eliot Prize finalist

A new poetry collection about loss, legacy and African American history, from the poetry editor of the New Yorker

'One of the most important poets of his generation' Washington Post

Kevin Young's new poetry collection, written over sixteen years, tells stories of community, nationhood and resistance, inspired in part by other lives. He starts in the bayous of Louisiana, and speaks from the voices of Millie and Christine McCoy, the conjoined African American 'Carolina Twins' - born into enslavement who later toured the world as free women.

Young writes of grief and hope as familiar yet surprising states: 'It's like a language, / loss -', he writes, 'learnt only / by living - there - '. Evoking the history of poetry, Young's new collection is defiant and playful, elegant and devastating - his voice shaping sorrow with music, humour and wit.

'Keeping up with him is like trying to keep up with Bob Dylan or Prince in their primes' New York Times

  • Published: 4 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529939927
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

Praise for Night Watch

Kevin Young is a poet of exceptional depth and sensitivity... Let yourself focus on every phrase

Ron Charles, Washington Post

As Young writes, we live in a world in which ‘the dead won’t leave/us be.’ Thankfully, there remains collective work to honor them. Night Watch continues one of the most vital currents in contemporary poetry, transforming history and its silences into lyric through the poet’s eloquent invitation: ‘O wounded soul,/ speak.’

New York Times

Impressionistic and potent... Young’s poems candidly and vividly trace the woven threads of loss and admiration, death and reemergence: ‘away from gravity/ & the cherry trees/ blooming early// before I was even ready / to believe again/ in beauty.’ This elegant volume deepens the body of work by a significant American poet

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Young’s compact, clever, pithy verses can be read for their melody and the feelings they evoke, and they can also be parsed for clues to deep meaning

The Ink

As with his other writing on historical figures, Young plumbs some of the most shameful parts of our nation’s history and society’s violences and holds them up to the light. . . . Yet, above all, Night Watch is a book defined by grief and the existential trembling before the precipice of mortality and how we bear witness to loss

LitHub

Concentrated, intricately crafted, richly evocative, peppered with song lyrics and conversational turns of phrase, alive with birds, trees, rain, and snow, Young’s poems delve into the mysteries of body and soul, memory and death, life and love

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