Quotes from Kevin Young

I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible?

There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that.

Forget reparations - we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin' or broader forms of not just survival but triumph.

Like hot foodI love youlike warmbread & coldcuts, buttersammichesor, days later, afterThanksgivingwhen I wantwhatever's left

Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.

Here are the facts: my folks grew up so poor that, in the words of Redd Foxx, there were twenty o's between the p and r.

Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'

The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.

what you must understand is that the herald & the horror are the same.

Letters I've never sent. This life we're only renting. Battered the world is - bartered - wander over it the stars finding us wanting.

To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.

Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don't know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented, rush in?

Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.

I was ten when Mike Smiley, half-Indian, skinny, brown-skinned, brought the word jigaboo to school like lunch, or the flu, fed him by his adopted white father who said that's what we called them then. By noon it was done--everyone had a name for what had been bothering them, some thing utterly human as hate.

We were never young.

I'm not a prayer, I just wish a lot.

Darling, it is your darkness where I want my body to be buried. You burn me at both ends, send the geese bumping within my skin.

Grief In the night I brush my teeth with a razor

It's getting harder to live without faith, or you, or whatever we choose to call what calls to us in the quiet. — Kevin Young, from "Book Rate," Dear Darkness: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

Grief for the earth, accepting the grief of the flesh and the grief of our grieving forever; grief for the flesh and the body and face, for the eyes that can see only into the world, and the mind that can only think and feel what the world gives it to think and to feel; grief for the mind gone, the flesh gone, the imperfect pain that must stay for its moment; and grief for the moment, its partial beauties, its imperfect affections, all severed, all torn.

I am no longer ashamed how for weeks, after, I wanted to be dead--not to die, mind you, or do myself in--but to be there already, walking amongst all those I'd lost, to join the throng singing, if that's what there is-- or the nothing, the gnawing-- So be it.

He said being dead was a little like living, only longer.

Like grass in rain, my dead grow at an amazing rate.

How humid the heart, its messy rooms! We eat spicy food, sweat like wood and smolder like the coal mine that caught fire decades ago, yet still smokes more than my great-uncle who will not quit- or go out-