Brown: Poems, Hardcover

James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prize-winning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things ``brown`` in this powerful new collection.

Divided into ``Home Recordings`` and ``Field Recordings,`` Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times. From ``History``--a song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students ``the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington``--to ``Money Road,`` a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's lynching, the poems engage place and the past and their intertwined power. These thirty-two taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi ``barkeep, activist, waiter`` Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle ``De La Soul Is Dead,`` about the days when hip-hop was growing up (``we were black then, not yet / African American``), remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story. A testament to Young's own--and our collective--experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time.