Jelly Roll: A Blues by Kevin Young

From the Publisher

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Washington Post

In his impressive third collection, Kevin Young uses the blues as a template, fusing popular music and black vernacular and thereby placing himself squarely in the African-American poetic tradition pioneered by such writers as Langston Hughes. — David Mills

Publishers Weekly

The careful, colloquial, lyrical Most Way Home (1995) established Young among the best-known poets of his emerging generation; this third book will satisfy many readers' long-held hopes. Despite the title, Young's new work relies not just on blues but on a plethora of musical genres; poems (almost all in short, two-line stanzas) take their titles and sometimes their sounds from older popular genres ("Dixieland" "Ragtime" and "Calypso") and classical forms ("Scherzo," "Nocturne"), bringing things up to date with "Disaster Movie Theme Music." Young matches these various models with a unity of subject: like an old-fashioned sonnet sequence writ large, the book chronicles the start, progress, and catastrophic end of a love affair. Early on, poems like "Shimmy" describe the birth of passion: "You are, lady,/ admired-secret// something kept/ afar." In "Riff," Young comes up with a precise, slow-motion polyphony: "I am all itch,/ total, since you done// been gone-zero/ sum, empty set." Despite the self-imposed, consistent limit of short lines, the verse here shows Young to be not only a terrific love poet but one of real emotional variety: after a sonnet sequence (called "Sleepwalking Psalms") Young turns from excitement and romance to disillusion, breakups and regrets ("Joy is the mile-/ high ledge"), concluding with poems addressed to landscapes, and with an elegy for a dead male friend. Young has daringly likened himself in earlier poems and prose to Langston Hughes: this versatile lyric tour de force may well justify the ambitious comparison. (Jan.) Forecast: While Young gained a reputation with poems in journals (and with his anthology Giant Steps), his sophomore effort To Repel Ghosts, a narrative poem about Jean-Michel Basquiat, was not quite a breakthrough, especially as its publisher went under. This long but reader-friendly third collection should do far better; expect strong reviews nationwide. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Though you won't find any musical notation in Young's third poetry collection, it's clear that the rhythms of traditional Delta and urban blues form the lattice against which these tightly spun lyrics, most written in couplets, are set. Young understands the blues as an effective medium for seduction and praise, yearning and loss, and while Jelly Roll pays homage to the traditional stylings of Robert Johnson and other seminal blues artists, its wry sense of humor ("Hottentot to trot/ you are not"), elliptically paced rhymes (past/ path, air/ stares), and associative freedom ("You are some sort/ of September// I look for your red car everywhere") evince a sophisticated, contemporary literary sensibility that never compromises the characteristic directness of the form. Young minimizes sexual swagger, preferring instead to explore the hazardous dimensions of emotional commitment with gritty grace and disarming candor ("Woman, knock me down,/ out, anoint-// just don't leave me lone// like God/ done, promising return"). While the collection's extended length might work against the economy of its individual poems, Young's achievement is nonetheless admirable, attesting to both the resilience of the blues and the skill of its talented practitioner.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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