After reading those individual poems as well as Allison Joseph's my father’s kites: poems (2010), I wondered would Young produce a full-length volume comprised of poems he wrote about his father.

I later came across 'Charity' in Progressive and 'Rosetta' in The New Republic. In many respects, the many poems about the blues and southern culture in Dear Darkness pay tribute to Young's father and grandmother, even when the poems don't seem to be directly about them.īack in 2009, I encountered Young's poem ' Bereavement' in The New Yorker. At the Furious Flower reading, Young said that his grandmother had died of a broken heart over the loss of her son. He dedicates his volume Dear Darkness (2008) to his father and grandmother, both of whom passed in 2004. Since that time, I've noted the publication of his poems about his father. I was at the Furious Flower Poetry conference in 2004 when Young gave a reading, and there, he noted the loss of his father in a tragic hunting accident. I was especially interested in the first sections of the volume where he writes about the loss of his father. This year, I was on Young's Book of Hours (2014), which was published back in March. I've tried to keep up with his active book publishing for the last 10 years or so. After spending so much time on 1960s and 1970s writers, I was looking to catch up on contemporary poets, and well, there was Young.

I really started playing close attention to Young's poetry in 2003 or 2004, right after I completed my major research project on the Black Arts Movement. I view my arrival to Young's works as late because of his previously published books at the time-his volume Most Way Home (1995) and the anthology he edited Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000). I came across To Repel Ghosts (2001) in around 2002.

In some respects, I felt like I discovered Kevin Young late.

Book of Hours by Kevin Young