Brown: Poems

James Brown. John Brown’s raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prize-winning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things brown in this powerful new collection.

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.