A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries. *Starred Review* Young is adept at netting the sensations of the moment and retrieving the spirit of the past in poems of monumental grief, stoicism, rapture, and sharp humor. In his eighth collection, Young marks the tenth anniversary of his father’s unexpected death, telling the story of the stunned aftermath with striking attunement to the utter transformation of what had been ordinary life. His tone is elegiac as he describes picking up his father’s effects at the hospital. He marvels over the strange munificence of organ donation, and when he acknowledges the poignant kinship he feels with his father’s dogs, he quips, “Brothers in paw.” Young is a virtuoso of succinctness, which in this book has particularly deep resonance: “The grammar of grief / gets written each day / & lost––and learnt again / by stone, by small / sliver, hieroglyph.” As he takes measure of paternal absence, he prepares to become a father, writing with awe of the astonishments of pregnancy and the revelations of ultrasound. From intimate reflections on the mysteries of the body, Young turns his penetrating attention to sky and land as though on a vision quest, tracking the sun and moon, desert and valley, wildflowers and geese in cosmic poems of life’s essentials and the great wheel of existence. He concludes, “Why not sing.” --Donna Seaman "If you read no other book of poetry this year, this should be the one." — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "An impressively musical exploration of grief and endurance. . . . Young wrestles with loss and joy with enviable beauty and subtlety." — Publishers Weekly "Young’s tone is always pitch-perfect in these poems." — Los Angeles Times "In Young’s poems, loss is built into beauty, and while (for the most part) we take turns experiencing them, they never seem truly separate. As such, many of his poems are both sad and sweet, solemn and celebratory, reading like tender eulogies for whatever a father’s future can hold." — The Boston Globe   "I’ve read plenty of books about grief and about coming through grief in my life, but I’ve never before encountered a book that gets it as right as Kevin Young’s Book of Hours . It’s one of those rare reading experiences that I recognized, even as I read it, as a book I was going to buy over and over again, to give as a gift to friends who’ve had that certain hole cut out of them, the loss that you can recognize from a distance, even in the happiest of times." — The Stranger Kevin Young is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels , winner of a 2012 American Book Award, and Jelly Roll , a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink. Young’s book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won a PEN Open Book Award. He is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English, curator of Literary Collections and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Bereavement Behind his house, my father’s dogs sleep in kennels, beautiful, he built just for them.   They do not bark. Do they know he is dead? They wag their tails   & head. They beg & are fed. Their grief is colossal   & forgetful. Each day they wake seeking his voice,   their names. By dusk they seem to unremember everything—   to them even hunger is a game. For that, I envy. For that, I cannot bear to watch them   pacing their cage. I try to remember they love best confined space to feel safe. Each day   a saint comes by to feed the pair & I draw closer the shades.   I’ve begun to think of them as my father’s other sons, as kin. Brothers-in-paw.   My eyes each day thaw. One day th