Quotes from Kevin Young

I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity--and sometimes, someone to say it for us. Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.

Daylight Savings" Like the money the light doesn't go as far these days

Sixth grade you didn't survive just endured.

Errata Baby, give me just one more hiss We must lake it fast morever I want to cold you in my harms & never get lo I live you so much it perts! Baby, jive me gust one more bliss Whisper your neat nothings in my near Can we hock each other one tore mime? All light wrong? Baby give me just one more briss My won & homely You wake me meek in the needs Mill you larry me? Baby, hive me just one more guess With this sing I'll thee shed

There are gods of fertility, corn, childbirth, & police brutality--this last is offered praise & sacrifice near weekly & still cannot be sated

A finger is a gun-- a wallet is a gun, skin a shiny pistol, a demon, a barrel already ready-- hands up don't shoot--

A shack made of ribs. A house made of out. A car made of rust. A smile made of doubt.

A quiet snowglobe of pain I want to shake. While the flakes fall like ash we race the train to reach the place Emmett Till last whistled or smiled or did nothing.

How I wish I could leave or forget all my dead.

Every pore mourns. Not the brain, nor the chest where bereavement nests, but the body, whole-- how it burns. The ache of new bone being grown.

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.

We are not born with tears. Your first dozen cries are dry. It takes some time for the world to arrive and salt the eyes.

In the night I brush my teeth with a razor

To waste this heart once more & have you here, not silent, only quiet, as before.

Grief might be easy if there wasn't still such beauty--would be far simpler if the silver maple didn't thrust its leaves into flame, trusting that spring will find it again.

Love is strange & almost always too late.

It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language.

It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits.

For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too.

Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role.

People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all.

Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change.

I try to have a lot of influences, which is to say not to have one specific influence too strongly; that can end up badly.

At our peril, we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs... For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.