Kevin Young’s necessary new book of witness creates a parade through time, and I love a parade. Especially one with such good music — the poems in Brown dance through bebop and into James Brown’s megafunk ... Every line of Brown is aware that this storm must scare the hell out of people who have locked their doors and kneel before Fox News Channel asking God what went wrong. Young’s book releases a universal shout — political in the best, most visceral way, critical, angry, squinting hard at this culture — while remaining at the same time deeply and lovingly personal. Love soars over every section, especially the most painful ones ... It’s a parade for all of us. Kevin Young loves you. That’s why he sometimes gives you a kick. It’s a rage that protects the most delicate observer’s heart.
[Young] effortlessly blends memories of his experiences — his childhood in Kansas, his college years and his travels — with reflections on sports figures, musicians and others who have influenced American life ... Young’s writing is crisp and well paced, his rhythms and harmonies complex. His virtuosity is on display as he illustrates the intersections between place and the past, the individual and the collective consciousness.
Young is a maximalist, a putter-inner, an evoker of roiling appetites. As a poet of music and food, his only rival is Charles Simic. His love poems are beautiful and sexy and ecstatic ... Young’s new book, Brown, is vital and sophisticated without surpassing anything he’s done before. It’s a solid midcareer statement ... Young has long been investigating the lives, art and lingering meanings of black cultural figures. He seems to know everything and everyone.
This new collection continues and deepens the poet’s lyrical exploration of the African American cultural influences who shaped his—and the nation’s—identity. Through short, spare lines that dance, chime, laugh, lament, and assert, Young creates a consciousness-in-motion, a weaving of personal and national histories that not only reanimates the past but moves forcefully into the present.
Thrillingly quick-footed, Young’s poems are also formally intricate and fully loaded with history, protest, and emotion as he writes of racial injustice.
Each of the four parts of the book, each a cluster of long and short poems, is named after an actual (and representational) train. Each train is packed with sad and joyous moments and storied passengers, some unfamiliar to the readers ... Displaying craft and artistry, the Brown poems furnish a delight to ponder over poetic observations, images, and ideas that are joined, dis-joined, and rejoined through clever placement of words in succeeding verses and varying pauses ... With poems so promising, Young is destined to receive acclamation in the world, beyond racial and national walls that have been built or might be built in the future. However, he needs to absorb non-local consciousness to reach the next level of quantum poetry.
Young’s faith in his readers’ emotional maturity here is refreshing. No space is wasted on half-adequate reconciliations or explanations; the violence is individual, and he gives it the space it needs ... As a treatment of blackness (or brownness), and of the inextricable violence at the center of its history, Brown can feel surprisingly reserved ... If Young tends toward the meditative over the clamorous, and toward familiar over unexplored territory, that may be a good thing. After all, the ghosts of collective memory, like the now-dilapidated Bryant’s Grocery, live on, and someone must tend to them.
...a typically ambitious collection that honors black culture and struggle ... The book’s profusion of detail and consistency of form are arguably both overwhelming and necessary; Young is writing through moments of the exemplary and mundane—'we breathe,/ we grieve, we drink/ our tidy drinks'—for himself and his community alike.
