Kevin Young > Quotes

“I now know pain
is part of any journey-
that this is the opposite
of grief, but grief
the only way I know
to describe waiting
and waiting without
knowing, hoping one day
joy will arrive.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“At night I count
not the stars
but the dark.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“Deep Song


Belief is what
buries us—that

& the belief in belief—
No longer

do I trust liltlessness
—leeward

is the world's
way—Go on

plunge in
—the lungs will

let us float.
Joy is the mile-

high ledge
the leap—a breath

above the lip of the abandoned
quarry—belief

the dark the deep.”
― Kevin Young, Jelly Roll

“Like hot food
I love you
like warm
bread & cold
cuts, butter
sammiches
or, days later, after
Thanksgiving
when I want
whatever's left”
― Kevin Young

“holding tight / to their pocketbooks / at the pearly gates / just in case.”
― Kevin Young

“Not the storm
but the calm
that slays me.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“It never ends, the bruise
of being”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“How I would sing

like a kettle to keep you”
― Kevin Young, Dear Darkness: Poems

“I have begun to believe in, and even to preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“a calm that would undo
most anyone who

thought noise worse
than its opposite”
― Kevin Young, Brown: Poems

“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.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“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.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“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.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Daylight Savings"

Like the money the light
doesn't go

as far these days”
― Kevin Young, Dear Darkness: Poems

“Everybody wants to go to heaven
but nobody wants to die
to get there.”
― Kevin Young, Brown: Poems

“Like God
Gumbo is hard
to get right

& I don't bother
asking for it outside
my mother's house.
Like life, there's no one

way to do it,
& a hundred ways,
from here to Sunday,
to get it dead wrong.”
― Kevin Young, Dear Darkness: Poems

“The apocalypse sounds
like this--
black men breaking in

to steal back the thing
once stole
from them.”
― Kevin Young, Brown: Poems

“A shack made of ribs.
A house made of out.

A car made of rust.
A smile made of doubt.”
― Kevin Young, Brown: Poems

“Grief

The borrowed handkerchief
where she wept

returned to me months later,
starched, pressed.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“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.”
― Kevin Young, Brown: Poems

“Letters
I've never sent.

This life
we're only renting.

Battered the world is -
bartered -
wander over it
the stars finding

us wanting.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“He said being dead was a little
like living, only longer.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“what you must
understand is that
the herald & the horror
are the same.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“In the night I brush
my teeth with a razor”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“To waste

this heart once more
& have you
here, not silent, only

quiet, as before.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“There are gods
of fertility,
corn, childbirth,

& police
brutality--this last
is offered praise

& sacrifice
near weekly
& still cannot

be sated”
― Kevin Young, Brown: Poems

“How I wish I could leave

or forget all my dead.”
― Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems

“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”
― Kevin Young

“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?”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don't know it.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing