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.
