A book of elegy, loss, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent.
"We sleep long, / if not sound," Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, "Till the end/ we sing / into the wind." In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South-one poem, "Kith," exploring that strange bedfellow of "kin"-the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. "Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead." Whether it's the Louisiana summer's fireflies in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that comprises our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them-of us-poetry can save. KEVIN YOUNG is the director of Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He was previously the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: A Blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk, a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for the National Book Award and named on many "best of" lists for 2017; and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the editor of eight other collections and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
