Most Way Home

Most Way Home is the incandescent first collection by award-winning poet Kevin Young. Selected by Lucille Clifton as part of the National Poetry Series, and now back in print, Most Way Home illuminates the African-American experience in language by turns gutsy and erudite, fresh and familiar — but never dry or academic. This is great American poetry by a young poet to watch.

"While the poet's descriptions of poverty and suffering are vivid and moving, the poems grow stronger as they move beyond a conventional mix of nostalgia and rage to a more thoughtful and transcendent vision....A promising first work." Library Journal

"A marvelous book, a marvelous poet." Booklist

Encompassing America's African-American landscape and rich oral histories of the South, this poetry collection centers on the concept of "home" and explores conflicts between black and white, North and South, ancestral and modern.

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.