Review by New York Times Review
Weighing in at 586 pages, Young's "Blue Laws" may be a contender for heavyweight champion of midcareer poetry retrospectives on the basis of sheer volume alone. So it makes perfect sense that the great boxer Jack Johnson should deliver one of the compilation's knockout soliloquies. Like the Galveston Giant - "always a swinger / a fast talker - / my rights/the kind that broke / men's jaws" - this poet makes a virtue of immodesty. "Blue Laws" celebrates black cultural traditions with the swagger of a prizefighter stepping into the ring. "Mama, I'm the man / with the most / biggest feet," Young writes in the poem "Boasts," advertising not only his own feet - both prosodic and pedestrian - but a vibrant historical vernacular as well. (The wry innuendo of these lines offers an object lesson on race and sexuality, too.) Incorporating poetic sequences on a range of historical figures - the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the colonial-era poet Phillis Wheatley, the Amistad slave mutineers - as well as blues poems, odes to soul food and an imaginary black film noir in couplets, "Blue Laws" could serve as a sourcebook for African-American Studies 101. Any book about the history of a people is, in a sense, a book of elegies. Throughout "Blue Laws," the political devastations of black experience frame Young's poetry of personal loss. In "The Mission," the sudden death of the poet's father elicits this meditation on how to live with an irremediable past: "I have come to know/sorrow's/not noun / but verb, something / that, unlike living, / by doing right / you do less of." The formal economy of Young's best work attunes us to the grammar of sorrow and living alike. The American paradox - freedom and constraint, openness and exclusion, abundance and want - is visible in the maximalist dimensions and minimalist prosody of "Blue Laws." Would a selection of, say, 400 pages have done the trick? Young ends his book with a declarative, triumphant and unanswerable question of his own: "Why not sing."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The preface informs us: The title Blue Laws comes from the traditional, often unenforced laws that restrict behavior on the Sabbath, which are duly presented on the following page, but also speaks to the blues music that informs America's and my own. The blues certainly are everywhere present in award-winning poet, scholar, and curator Kevin Young's highly original, richly sourced, archly provocative, audaciously witty, and deeply affecting poems. He writes searchingly of his family history and his own experiences, while drawing on the still underappreciated reservoir of African American history, culture, and art. This substantial assemblage brings together selections from Young's previous nine, striking books, beginning with his unusually assured debut, Most Way Home (1995), and including To Repel Ghosts (2001); Remix (2005), a tribute to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat; the tour de force Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (2011); and the elegiac Book of Hours (2014). He also brings together poems he's written in homage to seminal poet Phillis Wheatley, and, in chronological order, previously uncollected and unpublished poems. Young is an essential, dynamic, and resonant poet, and this commanding, 20-year retrospective belongs in libraries large and small.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this extensive and impressive selected volume that also includes a generous helping of unpublished poems, poet and critic Young, winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Prize for Book of Hours, puts his characteristically succinct narrative lines on full display as he crafts voices that speak to the pleasures and pains of African-American lives, including his own. Young demonstrates a deft skill for persona, taking on the voices of such historical figures as Jack Johnson, the great 20th-century boxer, and Cinque, the leader of the Amistad rebels. Music, especially blues, jazz, and hip-hop, moves as both an undertone and overtone throughout the book. Young shows his mastery of form throughout-particularly in "Urgent Telegram to Jean-Michel Basquiat"-while his love poems display a tremendous ear and the talent for turning stock images into moving metaphors: "Even a bird,/ a dog, got him a cage// he can bark/ all night in, or sing." Some poems feel more concerned with flexing their muscles than engaging the reader, and metaphors can seem redundant (not altogether surprising, given Young's prolific output), especially in a series of odes to foods. Yet Young also offers stunning confessional lines that will move the reader with their lyrical starkness, as in a heartrending series of elegies for his father: "The day will come// when you'll be dead longer/ than alive." (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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