Most Way Home

by Kevin Young

Overview

Encompassing America's African-American landscape and rich oral histories of the South, this poetry collection centers on the concept of "home" and explores conflicts between black and white, North and South, ancestral and modern.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781581950212
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	06/01/1998
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.25(d)
Age Range:	6 - 9 Years

About the Author

Kevin Young, author of this National Poetry Series winner, also published Giant Steps: African American Voices at the Crossroads of the Century. He teaches at the University of Georgia.

Table of Contents

	Reward	1
I.	Husbandry
	How to Make Rain	5
	The Dry Spell	7
	Visiting Home	9
	Miss Lucille	14
	An Almanac, 1939	17
	Five	18
	Southern University, 1962	20
	Anatomy	23
	Wake	25
	Fever	27
II.	The Spectacle
	Beauty	31
	The Spectacle	33
	The Thin Man's Apprentices	33
	Contortionist	35
	Brotherhood	37
	The Wonder Tongue	39
	The Escape Artist	41
	Pachyderm	44
	Atlas	45
	Teller	51
III.	Getting Religion
	Baptism	55
	Constance	57
	Revival	58
	Saying Grace	60
	The Living	60
	The Cures	63
	The Boiling	65
	The Slaughter	67
	The Kitchen	69
	The Works	71
	The Quench	74
	The Salon	76
	The Preserving	78
	Whitewash	80
IV.	Beyond the Pale
	Degrees	85
	Whatever You Want	86
	Clyde Peeling's Reptiland in Allenwood, Pennsylvania	88
	Driving Independence Day	91
	Central Standard Time	93
	Everywhere is Out of Town	94
	Eddie Priest's Barbershop & Notary	96
	Quivira City Limits	98
	Letters from the North Star	100

Editorial Reviews

"First books rarely sing with such controlled music. Young has a distinctive and unforgettable voice, virtuosic style, and mature command of his material. Any of these poems testifies to Young's genius. A marvelous book, a marvelous poet."
—Booklist

"In Young's alchemy, succulent scraps are gathered from daily life, distilled, and emerge, finally, as portable nuggets of home, carried wherever the poet may travel."
—The Voice Literary Supplement

"Young's descriptions of poverty and suffering are vivid and moving, and the poems grow stronger as they move beyond a conventional mix of nostalgia and rage to a more thoughtful and transcendent vision."
—Library Journal

"A rock-solid book, something you could grab hold of."
—John Yau

"This poet's gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American."
—Lucille Clifton

From the Publisher

A 1993 National Poetry Series selection, this harsh volume explores "home" as a place in the collective African American memory. Many of these poems are children's painful narratives of the rural South; one section entitled "The Spectacle" details freak show attractions from a local fair. A final section, "Beyond the Pale," moves beyond collective memory to contemporary ironies, combining the black oral tradition with strains of the dead white masters (Auden, for example): "See, in the end the tragedy is all/in the telling, not at the moment when the gator/slips out of Ched Peeling's trusty, thoroughbred/hands & gobbles down a few select/youngsters." While the poet's descriptions of poverty and suffering are vivid and moving, the poems grow stronger as they move beyond a conventional mix of nostalgia and rage to a more thoughtful and transcendent vision: "things do/not need me here, this world/dances on its own." A promising first work.-Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York

Library Journal