A review by missmarauder2
Jelly Roll by Kevin Young

5.0

This was absolutely fantastic. I loved his form; his words very very sparse, there were absolutely no extraneous or unnecessary filler words. I loved the shortness of the lines in most of his poems. I just think the form and style he uses is really great. That alone would make his poetry absolutely gorgeous.

What makes it even more gorgeous is the way he plays with sound. There are poems where the words or phrases don't really connect much to each other, but that doesn't matter because they sound so beautiful. To me, this is what poetry truly should be. There are definite points where he plays with a bluesy sort of African-American dialect, which I just found so wonderful-sounding when said out loud.

The fact is that Kevin Young manages to say volumes with very, very few words. And because his complex, poetic devices are so rare, such as metaphor, when he does use them, they are extremely powerful. This is definitely a poet I would read again, and a poetry volume I will pick up again.