Night Watch

Kevin Young is a poet of exceptional depth and sensitivity… Let yourself focus on every phrase – Ron Charles * Washington Post *As Young writes, we live in a world in which ‘the dead won’t leave/us be.’ Thankfully, there remains collective work to honor them. Night Watch continues one of the most vital currents in contemporary poetry, transforming history and its silences into lyric through the poet’s eloquent invitation: ‘O wounded soul,/ speak.’ * New York Times *Impressionistic and potent… Young’s poems candidly and vividly trace the woven threads of loss and admiration, death and reemergence: ‘away from gravity/ & the cherry trees/ blooming early// before I was even ready / to believe again/ in beauty.’ This elegant volume deepens the body of work by a significant American poet * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *Young’s compact, clever, pithy verses can be read for their melody and the feelings they evoke, and they can also be parsed for clues to deep meaning * The Ink *As with his other writing on historical figures, Young plumbs some of the most shameful parts of our nation’s history and society’s violences and holds them up to the light… . Yet, above all, Night Watch is a book defined by grief and the existential trembling before the precipice of mortality and how we bear witness to loss * LitHub *Concentrated, intricately crafted, richly evocative, peppered with song lyrics and conversational turns of phrase, alive with birds, trees, rain, and snow, Young’s poems delve into the mysteries of body and soul, memory and death, life and love * Booklist *The exquisite lyrical beauty of Night Watch depicts the slowly advancing night as counterpart and complement to the light of life and day, where the shadowy impositions of race, affliction, and the afterlife become the illumination we seek, the beautifully shimmering clarities of ‘this errant unebbing life. – David Woo, NBCC judge

Kevin Young is the director of Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and poetry editor of the New Yorker. He was previously the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and prose, including Stones, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Jelly Roll- A Blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; and Bunk, a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for the National Book Award. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

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