Brown: Poems by Kevin Young

Brown: Poems Reviews

• 
  Paltia

  Kevin Young writes poetry with so much heart and a swinging sense of inner beauty. Elegies to ease your burdens. Road maps to reflection. Bouncing rhythms of movement. Hey world, here he is, calling out to anyone who cares to listen. This is poetry that melts into your long term memory to stay with you forever. Gentle and graceful. Wild and wailing. Muchas gracias Bonnie G. for having the sensibility to recommend this one. I need my own copy to keep close.
• 
  Jenny (Reading Envy)

  This is my favorite collection from Kevin Young yet!
  
  Publisher blurb: "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."
  
  Kansas boyhood= baseball poetry
  Our times= moving, devastating tributes to young black men killed needlessly.
  
  My favorites include all the parts of "De La Soul is Dead," which quotes a different 90s song in each one, and "
  Hive."
  
  I received an advanced reader copy of this from the publisher through Edelweiss. It comes out April 17, 2018.
• 
  Ken

  As poetry books go, this is a big 'un. Kevin Young if nothing if not prolific, both books and poems-wise. This baby has a little of everything, starting with childhood and school days poems and working up to civil rights works and tributes to black men who were the victim of racist violence. Throughout, like a refrain, the words "brown" and "black" appear again and again in different ways.
  
  My only complaint is the overuse of tercets, especially in the entire first section of the book. If you ever thought you'd never care about stanzas, that view may be put to the test here after so many 3-lined stanzas. Luckily, later in the book, Young mixes it up.
• 
  Libby

  Kevin Young is the poetry editor of ‘The New Yorker’ and has published thirteen books of poetry. In this book, he gives voice to all things brown. I’m far from a poetry expert, but you don’t have to be one to enjoy these poems. Some of them are snappy, there’s a nice sense of rhythm. Some are upbeat, others more somber, taking on weighty subjects. A poem about Trayvon Martin talks about the list growing longer and “the soft song of your skull as an infant” which makes me think how we all start out the same way, as innocent souls. There’s another poem about Tamir Rice and one about Michael Brown.
  
  Young writes about playing sports as a young boy and how they were up against teams that had uniforms, while they did not, about how they were the underdog team and didn’t win any games. But they got better and better, until one day, they did win. At the end of the game, the other team spits in their hands when they came around to shake hands, and say, ‘Good game.” Poetry sometimes makes scenes like these stick in my mind. While there are many poems with great imagery like this, my favorite is the last poem in the book, entitled ‘The Hive.’ It is short and full of power. Instead of ‘The End’ at the end of his book of poems, there’s a screen door with the words “sorry… Closed.” Very creative! Highly recommended for those who enjoy poetry or nice rhythms and potent imagery, but also an insightful and reflective way of looking at current and other events.
  
• 
  Ellie

  Reads with rhythm, like songs of passion and sadness. Many poems documenting (in poetry of course) racism and the human cost. There is also elegiac poems about the young and their passions. A beautiful collection.
• 
  Kathleen

  This one took me a while, due to both its depth and breadth.
  
  Young plays with patterns, as in themes, such as music or sports or, sadly, the assault on black lives. He plays also in the forms his lines take, such as tercets, or a kind of chain verse where the last line of one poem is partially repeated in the next.
  
  What I liked best were how personal the poems felt, and his arresting phrases:
  In a poem about Arthur Ashe
  “your photo has a sound--
  call it About to be.
  Call it Maybe.”
  or in one about watching children at the pool
  “our boys’ bodies grow
  as hard to see
  as hope.”
  
  Two favorites:
  “Hive” that you can read here:
  https://poets.org/poem/hive
  and
  “Nightstick: A Mural for Michael Brown.” You can both read and listen to the author recite it here:
  
  https://poets.org/poem/nightstick-mur...
• 
  Shirleen R

  Fantastic collection. Kevin Young divides the collection into sections such as school athletics, hip hop of his youth, Kansas, and young blackn young black boys in their wrestling, baseball, and other team escapades surprised and delighted me . Frankly, I forget the *beauty* of these games. That athletics and arts, sports and literature are not antithetical.
  
  These poems are intimate and honest. Their growing young black subjects aspire to turn sports places into college scholarships. They voice anxiety over their wrestling weight and their body image. They devote themselves to their coaches and teachers, and those teachers raise them up, but as easily say racist comments that dehumanize their Black players, and demoralize them. Overall, I liked how Young's poetry reminds us that early Black sports legends Arthur Ashe (tennis), the Harlem Globetrotters (basketball), or Reggie Jackson (baseball) were as artful as they were powerful
  
  I loved Young's love of language. The way he extracts favorite lines from hip-hop classics in the poetry section "Field Recordings", 'Ode to Dirty Bastard' or 'De La Soul is Dead'
  
  The final section 4 pays tribute to Emmitt Till, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown. A synesthetic confluence occurs again, when Young pairs visual images with oral poetry tradition. IN titles like Triptych for Trayvon: Not Guilty (A Frieze for Sandra Bland); Limbo (A Fresco for Tamir Rice), Nightstick (A Mural for Michael Brown), Young's emblematic painting forms insist that Bland, Rice, Brown remain visible, imho.
  
  I know Kevin Young the critical thinker and researcher. He is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and prior to the Schomburg, Young was a Professor at Emory University. IOW, I think of Young as the panel moderator, or the talking expert who gives "blurbs" and "soundbites" when racial conflicts hit the news events. Add to Young's portfolio, he is an adept researcher. Last year he published Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (2017). I didn't know what to expect of his poetry, but I sense poetry is his first love and perhaps his most solid writing ground.
  
• 
  Bonnie G.

  This is why I love the Book Riot Read Harder challenge; I rarely read poetry, and read this in response to the Read Harder prompt "A collection of poetry published since 2014. The collection was wonderful, not a weak piece. I was particularly delighted with Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters (turning tears into confetti is one of the most heartbreaking and true allusions I have heard.) De la Soul is Dead was a close second, and the best laugh came in the Ode to Old Dirty Bastard. And there are a lot of laughs, a lot of joy in this collection, but it takes its place beside a lot of anger, a lot of frustration and confusion. The Emmett Till piece is gutting and adds depth to the stark pain as Young invokes the names of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and other more recent victims of the devaluation of black lives. This slim volume touches on every aspect of brown-ness in a way that demands real reflection rather than just visceral response, and at this moment in time I can't imagine a more noble and necessary thing to demand than reflection.
  
  One note: Young wears his love of music well. In addition to the omnipresent references to music, (from Prince to ODB to James Brown to Jim Carroll to Radiohead to Leadbelly) there is a rich musicality to Young's poetry, and listening to him read on the audio was a real advantage for me.
• 
  Matt Graupman

  Finally, finally, FINALLY I’ve found the kind of poetry I’ve been looking for: eloquent, insightful, blunt, and beautiful. Kevin Young’s “Brown,” an exploration of brown-ness, be it James Brown, Brown Vs. Board Of Education, or the more general minority experience, doesn’t hide behind flowery language or dense layers of allusion and metaphor. Young’s poems get in your face, say what they need to say, and leave you dizzy and altered. With short bursts of imagery and deft turns of phrase, the works in this collection feel primal and unforgiving. I’m blown away. THIS is what I want poetry to be like.
  
  FAVORITES:
  “Rumble In The Jungle” - An appreciation of Muhammad Ali’s famous “rope a dope” tactic in his fight with George Forman.
  “Lead Belly’s First Grave” - An examination of how the influential musician has been memorialized over the years.
  “De La Soul Is Dead” - An epic chain of poems examining Young’s experiences of growing up as a black man, seen through the lens of popular music.
  “Sundaying” from the “Repast” oratorio - A gentle ode to contentment.
• 
  Kim

  This book is an education, immersive in the way excellent fantasy novels often are. Inasmuch as it's possible to grok another culture, Brown has invited me into the experience of growing up black in America. The racism, yes, and the violence perpetrated against, but also sports and music, friendship and fatherhood, the rhythm of language and the claiming of heritage and history, heroes and tremulous, pained hope. I want to read more of Young's poetry...and once I have, I'm coming back to discover these again.
• 
  Caroline

  3.25 stars
  
  I appreciated this collection for its variety of subjects, Young's musicality, and the clear imagery. I liked the song-titled poems the best. I just sometimes felt like the poems were a little too surface-level, too what-you-see-is-what-you-get. If that makes sense. I also read this collection during a rather overwhelming week, so it's possible I just wasn't giving it the proper attention (and was reading it on my phone as a library ebook loan, also not ideal).
• 
  Anthony

  hey look at me, I’ve stopped reading bad poetry! This is good poetry! Read this instead!
• 
  Jessika

  Gwendolyn Brooks vibes, for sure.
• 
  Liz

  I love Kevin Young, and I also love enjambment, so this collection was a complete delight. My especial favorites:
  
  - Brown
  
  - Fishbone
  
  - De La Soul Is Dead : O how high we jump. / Reaching for the sky / hurricane-purple & a night / mostly black, dark blue, red. / Nobody, nobody, was dead. Yet--
  
  - Triptych for Trayvon Martin
  
  - Repast : And we're not getting / any younger / but today no older neither / And why not / live forever / Why not wait / till tomorrow / to pay the phone / the gas electric / Why not pray / for a tie / instead of a win / for the game to go / long, on & on, / a million innings
  
  - Hive : Let the gods look away / as always. Let this boy / who carries the entire / actual, whirring / world in his calm / unwashed hands, / barely walking, bear / us all there / buzzing, unstung.
• 
  Kate

  Stunning. The path through "De La Soul Is Dead" — as through baseball games and wrestling matches, as along train tracks — is beautifully, meticulously, tensely crafted. Other favorites include the two-line "Ode to Big Pun," "I doubt it" and the "Sunflower" section of "Ad Astra Per Aspera." But the final poem, "Hive," the distillation of Young's gentle, hopeful tenderness in all the poems about his son, is my favorite of them all:
  
  

  Let him be right.
  Let the gods look away
  as always. Let this boy
  
  who carries the entire
  actual, whirring
  world in his calm
  
  unwashed hands,
  barely walking, bear
  us all there
  
  buzzing, unstung.
• 
  Lex

  I liked this quite a lot, although I didn't understand all of the sports/baseball references. My favorites were Flame Tempered, Sunflower, History, and De La Soul is Dead.
  
  "Sleeping bags were a war zone where nobody died or got sent home"
  
  "Later I waved to her from the podium after winning City, my smile as long as the shot she'd thought I had."
  
  "I found your first record yesterday-it looked like the past & sounded like the future-that combo platter I loved best of all."
• 
  Caleb Ingegneri

  It took a while for me to get into Kevin Young's poetic sensibilities. But it was a rewarding effort. Sharp, short lines with tactile feel mete out Young's praise for his heroes. Young's ability to infuse historical awareness, poetic depth, and storytelling into one form make Brown the collection it is.
• 
  Tim Belonax

  I took my time with this book. Over the course of a year I’d pick it up and finish a few poems, rolling them around in my mind, digesting them. It’s a beautiful collection that I could connect with and also investigate. To top it off, the cover is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.
• 
  Krysten

  There were some poems I connected with, especially ones about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. I wasn’t sure 100% about the flow and so sometimes I didn’t understand which took away from the overall experience. But I did appreciate the theme and the history it goes through.
• 
  Ursula

  3.75/5
  
• 
  Christopher

  Throughout American history, Brownness has been the source of some of America's greatest ills: racism, slavery, and injustice. But the word Brown has been important throughout our history too: Brown v. Board of Education, John Brown, and more. In this collection of poetry, Mr. Young explores this wide spectrum through reflections on America's past and present culture as well as his own childhood recollections in Kansas. It is a fine collection with some very memorable poems, especially the ones in the second half such as "Triptych for Trayvon Martin" and "Repast." His poems in the first half regarding sports and famous African-American athletes were also very enjoyable too. As we continue to grapple with this nation's history of racism and racial injustice, voices and poems like these are as important as ever and I recommend this book for anyone interested in both poems and racial justice.
• 
  Liz Mc2

  I have enjoyed Young's conversations with other poets on the New Yorker's poetry podcast (he is their new poetry editor) so wanted to read some of his poems. I loved this collection and its reflections on brown--James Brown, Brown v. Board (a case I always forget is, like Young, from Kansas), growing up brown. There's baseball, jazz, 90s hip hop, civil rights. Violence and slights, music and food, love between friends, between father and son.
• 
  Kevin

  While I've read Kevin Young poems before, this was the first collection of his I'd read in its entirety. It made me want to chase down a few more of them before the year's out. His poetic preoccupations—baseball, blues, and the world his son is growing up in—are keenly examined. While the collection's title, "Brown", indicates Young's desire to engage with brownness as a thematic and topical springboard—brown skin, James Brown, John Brown, Brown v. Board, etc.—its scope is quite broad. In "History", for example, he talks about the mid-year death of teacher. Mr. W does not present as a warm, woke, or otherwise inspiring teacher; he's dubbed "brilliant" but has, by the time the narrator arrives, begun to "slip." There's a finality to what he teaches, something unconcerned with "coloreds & women's libbers" and a patriotic vision of American military might. "History/ was what each night/ he erased." And yet as we learn more about Mr. W, we see some tenderness; we see his life condensed into a few dozen stanzas; we see him preparing feverishly for when he'll no longer be able to teach or take care of his kids "who built or broke/ his heart." It reminded me a bit of Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays", where Hayden, thinking of his father's thankless, cold, and remote work helping his family, asks "What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?"
  
  Young is also fantastic on sports, and his descriptions of baseball, wrestling, etc. made me feel about stories my own father told me of his childhood. In "Mercy Rule", he describes stealing bases thusly:"I ran/ like only the sly,/ four-eyed can—to get there/ & to get away—/ to reach somewhere/ safe, where I/ never thought/ to stay." He's also got a great and rather moving piece about racial prejudice that hinges on Roberto Clemente. Later, he praises the Harlem Globetrotters: "Because where else do Generals/ meet defeat without blood."
  
  Young's poems are also fantastic to read aloud. He's got a great control of rhythm and I found myself syntactically lead while reading in a way that's hard to find with some other contemporary poets.
  
  RIYL: Wrassling, poetic renderings of the terrors of Phys. Ed., Fishbone, Ken Burns's Baseball in theory but you don't have the time for it.
  
  
• 
  Kaleigh

  I liked this book of poems a great deal, however, Young's style of writing poetry does not gel easily in my brain. I had to slow down and process many of them in order to feel like I was even scratching the surface on the deeper meaning.
  The reason I gave this book the three stars I did, is because although the writing style didn't resonate with me, it was very immersive and personal-feeling. It made me learn more about the experiences of PoC, as athletes, within legislation, and within the experience of being black in America. I found that tremendously impactful, and for that reason, I recommend anyone read it who enjoys poetry.
• 
  Katy

  
  “In the vestibule latecomers
  wait just outside
  the music—the river
  
  we crossed to get here—
  wide boulevards now”
  
  I don’t know how to explain what these poems did to me. The way he builds rhythm and tension, the depth and breadth of black history, the melding of past & present, the way he leaves you holding the weight of a moment after the last stanza—I just can’t with you, Kevin Young. Some personal favorites: “Shirts & Skins” (the way he paints that moment in the roller rink... aggggh), “Mercy Rule”, “History,” “Money Road”, and “Brown” (I will never forget the imagery in this poem. Stunning).
  
• 
  Meaghan

  The poems in this collection were rhythmic and flowed very well. Young writes about childhood, racism, and memory. The collection contains many elegies to iconic Black people as well as those sadly lost to police brutality and racism. All of the poems ring with emotion and feel like a song. I enjoyed this work!
  .
  My favorites:
  -"Thataway"
  -"Ashe"
  -"Shirts & Skins"
  -"Ad Astra Per Aspera"
  -"Ice Storm, 1984"
  -"Brown"
  -"James Brown at B.B. King's on New Year's Eve"
  -"Fishbone"
  -"Lead Belly's First Grave"
  -"Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard"
  -"B.B. King Plays Oxford, Mississippi"
  -"Triptych for Trayvon Martin"
  -"Money Road"
  -"Hive"
• 
  Nuha

  This book is a celebration of black life, black joy and black tragedy. It’s broken down into four sort of sections, childhood, teenage, adulthood and author’s personal heroes. One of the poems, or more rightfully elegy, focuses on Booker Wright and his life. It is my favorite. You can hear the humming of the restaurant, the quiet murmurs of the patronage, the slap of good Southern cooking, the rhythmic melody of Wright’s own voice. It’s quiet beautiful, just as the rest of the book. When read together, it sings like an old blues melody.
• 
  Elke

  i listened to this as an audiobook and it only took me all of forever
  but that's not the books fault. it would have been easier for me to keep holding the poems if i could see them. easier for me to try to understand, maybe. but that's not the books job.
  this collection is not about me and not for me either. it is a story about growing up black and brown in a white america and it is marvellously told. i loved many pieces. there where just as many that went over my head, and that's fine.
  it was wonderful to listen to this and let it carry me to places i wouldn't have seen otherwise.