Book Review

The book of poetry I chose to write about for this assignment was Most Way Home by Kevin Young. I liked the style and writing of the two Kevin Young poems we read in class and I was interested in getting more of a sense for what he liked to write about. This book of poems has four different parts to it that are titled Husbandry, The Spectacle, Getting Religion, and Beyond the Pale. Although each section might be slightly different in terms of the context, they more or less all relate to the idea of someone’s homelife as an African American growing up in the south. Most of the speakers seem to be children talking about what they see in their families or how they remember them. He uses enjambments in these poems, which really help keep up the natural flow of his poems so it comes out almost like a story. There is an aspect of history in a lot of the poems as well as a sense for the author’s personal feelings and certain memories he might have about growing up and his own family.

The first three sections really focus on how the members of the speaker’s families are important and what they appreciate in their life even if they don’t really have a great amount of it. The poems still describe the hardships that these African American families had with growing up in this period in the south. One of the sections that I really enjoyed was The Spectacle. These poems talk about the “freaks” that someone might see at a fair but combines this idea with crazy aspects of real life. In “The Escape Artist” he compares a man trying to get out of chains in a tank of water to a man being stuck in cotton fields and not being able to escape this life. The last section of this book of poems really kind of goes a different way than the previous three. Most of the poems before the end involve memories where a child is the speaker and the stories that are being told involve good times and bad times. The last section differs in that the speaker seems to be grown up and is talking about their view of contemporary society. The speaker considers the current state of the world a disappointment and views everything that has been created in this society as hurting a group of people in the process. The author doesn’t like what the world has become and faces confusion about considering this world to be his home and how he misses childhood and wants to go back to the home that was described in the previous poems.