Book Report: Jelly Roll by Kevin Young

Jelly Roll: Torgo approves

One of the things I'm most interested in with poetry is sound. I enjoy poetry where the poet is toying with the elasticity of language, crafting interesting sounds on the page, making art that's both challenging and fun to read (especially, these days, to a toddler).

Kevin Young has that. He reminds me a little of Ethelbert in his use of heavily enjambed lines (in terms of sound), but also his love of love poetry. "Jelly Roll" is always either celebrating a woman or grieving over her loss.

He's most playful with language in "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...


Most of the poems aren't as Cummings-esque. He pulls in the blues in "Disaster Movie Theme Music" (a poem split by lines):

Standing at your back door
The dogs bark so loud

Knocking on your back door
Till your dog barks so loud

As many times I come here girl
Now I'm not allowed?

--------

Creek done risen
Creek done rose

It ain't the creek that
took off all them clothes.


One of the best poems is "Lyre" (this is the whole poem):

Walking up the hill
from hell, singing

the shadows back--
all them wanting

to be among the living--
at my pants

leg like cockleburrs
or children, the dead

clutched clung

-----

I carried you cross
the coldest reaches

Led you back from that
under I had placed you,

hurt by my hand--what
I couldn't take--

the way I had wounded,
yet went on

-----

When I said I would
not turn to look

I lied. The lyre
in me is strong

enough even the birds
the dead can hear, but how

could I make you? I wanted
at my hand you

listening--instead you
hesitated, wished

to follow
me. Indeed. Now

I know I was merely
barking

at the least noise, that by
a leash you let me

----

Love, it was not that
my back was bare

to you--though it was
that too--nor to see

that face of yours
I already by heart knew--No,

I turned cause dust was
what made me up

& I wanted to see some
of the salt of you--to lick

whatever had helped you not
fall apart when far

forever from me you went


There's playfulness, but also a sophisticated emotional core. Young uses line breaks and run-on sentences to toy with the reader. I love that. But he also has something to say. He's adding to the history of heartbreak poems, a genre that always seem exhausted until a book like this comes along.

Unfortunately, it goes on too long. The poems are sparse and move quickly, but I still don't believe the book needs 190 pages. The same could have been achieved in 150, easily, or 130. Still, when he's on, he's on. And he's on enough to make this a worthwhile read.