Sign in
Holiday Gift Guide
Books
Kids
Popular
Authors & Events
Gifts & Deals
Audio
Sign In
Look Inside
Oct 13, 2015 | ISBN 9780375711886 Buy
Also available from:
Oct 13, 2015 | ISBN 9780375711886
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.
KEVIN YOUNG is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor for The New Yorker. He is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015,longlisted for the National… More about Kevin Young
“If you read no other book of poetry this year, this should be the one.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution“An impressively musical exploration of grief and endurance. . . . Young wrestles with loss and joy with enviable beauty and subtlety.” —Publishers Weekly“Young’s tone is always pitch-perfect in these poems.” —Los Angeles Times“In Young’s poems, loss is built into beauty, and while (for the most part) we take turns experiencing them, they never seem truly separate. As such, many of his poems are both sad and sweet, solemn and celebratory, reading like tender eulogies for whatever a father’s future can hold.” —The Boston Globe “I’ve read plenty of books about grief and about coming through grief in my life, but I’ve never before encountered a book that gets it as right as Kevin Young’s Book of Hours. It’s one of those rare reading experiences that I recognized, even as I read it, as a book I was going to buy over and over again, to give as a gift to friends who’ve had that certain hole cut out of them, the loss that you can recognize from a distance, even in the happiest of times.” —The Stranger
Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network
Stay in Touch
By clicking Sign Up, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
