Wednesday, February 10, 7:30 PM
Kevin Young presents Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1995-2015
In conversation with Mary-Louise Parker

Greenlight is thrilled to welcome acclaimed poet Kevin Young back to Greenlight to present his new collection Blue Laws, a rich and lively gathering of highlights from the first twenty years of an extraordinary career, interspersed with “B sides” and “bonus tracks”. From his stunning lyric debut Most Way Home and the amazing “double album” life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, through his broken-hearted Jelly Roll and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness and Book of Hours, this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting. Together with wonderful outtakes and previously unseen blues, the profoundly felt poems here of family, Southern food, and loss are of a piece with the depth of personal sensibility and humanity found in his Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels or bold sequences such as “The Ballad of Jim Crow” and a new “Homage to Phillis Wheatley.” Young talks about his poetic history with actor and writer Mary-Louise Parker (author of Dear Mr. You), an ardent fan of Young’s work.