Jelly Roll: A Blues by Kevin Young

Jelly Roll: A Blues

$20.00
Sale price  $20.00 Regular price 
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Jelly Roll: A Blues by Kevin Young

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Jelly Roll: A Blues

$20.00
Sale price  $20.00 Regular price 
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In this jaunty and intimate collection, Kevin Young invents a language as shimmying and comic, as low-down and high-hearted, as the music from which he draws inspiration. With titles such as "Stride Piano," "Gutbucket," and "Can-Can," these poems have the sharp completeness of vocalized songs and follow a classic blues trajectory: praising and professing undying devotion ("To watch you walk / cross the room in your black / corduroys is to see / civilization start"), only to end up lamenting the loss of love ("No use driving / like rain, past / where you at"). As Young conquers the sorrow left on his doorstep, the poems broaden to embrace not just the wisdom that comes with heartbreak but the bittersweet wonder of triumphing over adversity at all.

Sexy and tart, playfully blending an African American idiom with traditional lyric diction, Young's voice is pure American: joyous in its individualism and singing of the self at its strongest.
Book Details
Publisher:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN:
9780375709890
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
208
Authors:
Kevin Young
Published Date:
2005-02-01
Language:
English
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About Kevin Young

A member of the Dark Room Collective as a young writer, Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, grew up largely in Topeka, Kansas, and studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University before earning an MFA at Brown. Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011) won an American Book Award. His nonfiction study Bunk (Graywolf Press, 2017) received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He directed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and serves as poetry editor of The New Yorker.

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