Book of Hours

Praise

“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