"In this lyrical picture book from an award-winning poet, adapted for audio, a young boy cherishes a neighborhood field throughout the changing seasons. With charming words, this beautiful story celebrates a child's relationship with nature.
There was a boy
named Emile
who fell
in love with a field.
It was wide
and blue--
and if you could have
seen it
so would've you.
Emile loves the field close to his home--in spring, summer, and fall, when it gives him bees and flowers, blossoms and leaves. But not as much in winter, when he has to share his beautiful, changeable field with other children...and their sleds. This relatable and lyrical ode to one boy's love for his neighborhood field celebrates how spending time in nature allows children to dream, to imagine...and even to share."
"A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called 'one of the poetry stars of his generation' (Los Angeles Times).
'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."
"James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things 'brown' in this powerful new collection.
"Vital and sophisticated ... sinks hooks into you that cannot be easily removed." -The New York Times
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.
From 'History'-a song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students 'the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington'-to 'Money Road,' a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's lynching, the poems engage place and the past and their intertwined power.
These thirty-two taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi 'barkeep, activist, waiter' Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle 'De La Soul Is Dead,' about the days when hip-hop was growing up ('we were black then, not yet / African American'), remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story.
A testament to Young's own-and our collective-experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time."
"Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution.
Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of 'truthiness' where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art."
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