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The place everything has come to is where a new book of essays by the poet and professor Kevin Young lives: in some great, grey area. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness roughly spans the history of black American art and tries, among other things, to get at what it is, essentially, to be black.
Young selectively unpacks the enormous suitcase of black culture and, too infrequently, asserts himself into the sorting. He remembers, revisits, and revises. The task he's set before himself is both unenviable (that's one big-ass suitcase) and exciting (what if he actually pulls this off?). The book argues and sifts its way from slave narratives to jazz to funk and rock and hip-hop with stops along the way for close reconsiderations of poets like Langston Hughes and Bob Kaufman.
It's full of allusions and ideas, half-ideas, dropped names, dropped ideas. You always feel that Young is severely under the influences of everything and everyone he's writing about. These are essays, treatises, and term papers—written with a contact high. In five pages, he might mention The Tempest, the Titanic, W.H. Auden, the Middle Passage, the boxer Jack Johnson, Peer Gynt, Muhammad Ali, Seamus Heaney, Bo Diddley, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Johnson, Black Like Me, and Tiger Woods. He is riffing, freestyling, and action-painting, yes. But he’s also driving so fast that there's rarely time to stop and look out the windows.
-- Wesley Morris, Slate
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For the rest of Wesley Morris's Slate review, click here. You may order the book here.
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