In Conversation: Kaveh Akbar & Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the author of 14 books, including Brown: Poems; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015; Book of Hours: Poems; Jelly Roll: a blues – a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Post-Facts, and Fake News; and The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. The poetry editor of The New Yorker, Young is the editor of nine other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. In his latest collection, Stones: Poems (Knopf Publishing Group), he offers an ode to his home places and his dear departed, and to what of them – of us – poetry can save. Whether it’s the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection) or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. The Los Angeles Times called Stones a “book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called one of the poetry stars of his generation.”

Iranian-born Kaveh Akbar is the author of two books of poetry, Calling a Wolf a Wolf: Poems and Pilgrim Bell: Poems (Graywolf Press), and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. His poems appear in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Best American Poetry. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In Pilgrim Bell, Akbar takes readers on a spiritual journey of self-denial. He offers prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance – the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation – teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness. Six poems in this collection are titled “Pilgrim Bell” and each evokes a new mystical experience. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called the collection “rich and moving. … This impressive, thoughtful work shimmers with inventive syntax and spiritual profundity.”