The Art of Losing - by Kevin Young (Paperback)

About the Book

"Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets." -Billy Collins

Book Synopsis

"Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets." -Billy Collins

The Art of Losing is the first anthology of its kind, delivering poetry with a purpose. Editor Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning. Divided into five sections (Reckoning, Remembrance, Rituals, Recovery, and Redemption), with poems by some of our most beloved poets as well as the best of the current generation of poets, The Art of Losing is the ideal gift for a loved one in a time of need and for use by therapists, ministers, rabbis, and palliative care workers who tend to those who are experiencing loss.

Among the poets included: Elizabeth Alexander, W. H. Auden, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, Ted Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, and James Wright.

Review Quotes

"Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy, and uses his own experience with the cycle of mourning to structure the book in sections titled 'Reckoning, ' 'Regret, ' 'Remembrance, ' 'Ritual, ' 'Recovery, ' and 'Redemption.' And the poems are as diverse and universal as the emotions of loss." --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"[Young's] latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful, gathering poems about suffering and overcoming loss ... While these poems won't offer easy answers to grief, they will keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in the last poem of this book, 'All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever." --Publishers Weekly

"A book for easing the heart in pain. A chorus of poets (the first of its kind) brought together expressly to guide us through dark times when 'the eye begins to see.' Kevin Young is the right guy at the right time to do this. Brilliant." --Mark Matousek, author of When You're Falling, Dive and Ethical Wisdom

About the Author

Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark, and Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.