Synopses & Reviews
Kevin Young follows his acclaimed exploration of the blues in
Jelly Roll with another playful riff on a vital art form, giving us a film noir in verse.
Black Maria the title is a slang term for a police van as well as a hearse is a twisting tale of suspicion, passion, mystery, and the city. Young channels the world of detective movies, picking up its lingo and dark glamour in five "reels" of poetry the adventures of a "soft-boiled" private eye, known as A.K.A. Jones, and an ingenue turned femme fatale, Delilah Redbone, who's come to town from down south ("Mama bent till dark / tending rows to send / Me to school...I wanted / To head on & hitch...strike it / Big"). We follow Jones and Delilah through a maze of aliases and ambushes, sex and suspicions, fast talk and hard luck, in Shadowtown where noir characters abound. The Killer, The Gunsel, The Hack, The Director, The Champ, and The Snitch are among the local luminaries and beautiful losers who mingle with Jones and his elusive lady as they stalk one another through the scenes of the poet's dazzling "treatment." Charming, funky, bleak, humorous, picaresque, and full of pathos,
Black Maria is brimming with the originality and stark lyricism we have come to expect from this remarkable poet.
When we met her first request:
Got a light?
*
so gave her that instead.
*
Ashtray full of butts
& maybes.
*
The sound of her heels down the hall
to me means reveille.
(from "Stills" )
Review
"A private eye irrigated with booze and soused by desire falls for a dangerous dame in Kevin Young's new book, Black Maria, a noir in verse that will give Raymond Chandler's best a run for its money." South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Review
"[H]ighly entertaining, often dazzling and, as book reviewers like to say but rarely about contemporary poetry compulsively readable." Joel Brouwer, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[Young] pulls off some of the wittiest, sexiest, and most barbed put-downs, come-ons, and linguistic sleights of hand found in contemporary poetry....Young turns cliche inside out in an ingenious celebration of improvisation in art and in life." Booklist
About the Author
Kevin Young is the author of three previous collections of poetry and the editor of Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets anthology Blues Poems, and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. His most recent book, Jelly Roll: A Blues, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. A recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Young is currently Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University.