Books by Kevin Young

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021**A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, '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.

A literary landmark: Kevin Young presents the biggest and best anthology of black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the presentOnly now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of many voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. And only here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, is this glorious living tradition wholly revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history--in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective--and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly Black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit, the barbershop, and the street. And appreciate, in the anthology''s concluding sections, why contemporary African American poetry, amply recognized in recent National Book Awards and Poet Laureates, is flourishing as never before. Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

Description Riding the Edge is about the author's struggles through life in dealing with his bipolar disease coupled with attention deficit disorder. There is humor and sadness to the book but it is a life truly lived on the edge.About the AuthorKevin Young, born in 1963, has lived with bipolar disease all his life but was not diagnosed as such until 2009. How bipolar affected his life can be both sad and humorous. Learning to live with the disease without going over the edge is the hardest part.

What happened to the documents captured in the Alamo? Does a ghost actually haunt the state capitol in Austin? Was John Wilkes Booth killed or did he escape and flee to Central Texas? The authors present the known facts and circumstances of these and other mysteries.

Ever since its first flowering in the 1920s, jazz has had an influence on American poetry, and this anthology offers a collection of jazz poems. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Movement, from the poets of the New York School to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a literary force.