Reader Score
75%
75% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 3 reviews on
"We sleep long, / if not sound," Kevin 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 fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught 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 makes up 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.
Richie Hofmann is a poet.
“Sting” by Kevin Young @Deardarkness from STONES @AAKnopf https://t.co/LFyV4qLgc2
Author of A Place Like Mississippi, Ever is a Long Time, and The House at the End of the Road. Visiting Professor @UMLibArts. 2021-22 @RadInstitute Fellow.
“[Newman] juxtaposes sourced archival black and white images…with his constructed contemporary imagery which is grounded and contextualized by essays and poems written by himself, W. Ralph Eubanks, Patricia Smith, and Kevin Young.” https://t.co/FflSqYK9uN
Poetry Daily presents a poem each day from new books and journals, along with poetry news, announcements, and more. Est. 1997.
Today's Featured Poet: Kevin Young is the Director of the Smithsonian’s @NMAAHC. The poetry editor of @NewYorker, he is also the author of 15 books of poetry and prose, including Stones, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. https://t.co/a9smmYCHyl
"Distilled meditations on the deep resonance of family and home . . . Evocations of church services, rain, sun, and the music of the dark entwine nature and human longing . . . For Young, words are stones; poems are cairns." --Donna Seaman, Booklist