gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young's previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut ( 1995) and the amazing "double album" life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001;"remixed" for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted (2003) and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in (2008) and (2014), 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 or bold sequences such as "The Ballad of Jim Crow" and a new "Homage to Phillis Wheatley."