Brown: Poems

Description

A prizewinning poet turns his attention to the many meanings of “brown,” tracing how color, history, and memory braid together in lived experience. Across thirty-two taut poems and sequences—moving between “Home Recordings” and “Field Recordings”—the collection follows personal recollection and public record as they shape one another, from a Kansas boyhood to sites of racial violence and the cultural aftershocks that follow. With poems that feel like songs, pilgrimages, and performances, it explores themes of blackness and identity, the politics of education and representation, and the way art and music carry both grief and momentum. Kevin Young’s signature blend of lyric intelligence and cultural range makes this a sustained, resonant work—beautiful on the surface, but impossible to forget once it sinks in.

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