Poetry for a state of emergency

Kevin Young's "Night Watch" engages with grief -- and offers an alternative to doomscrolling.

As our country hurtles toward authoritarianism, it’s tough not to default to perpetual shock and outrage. The guardrails we thought would protect us haven’t held. We use the tools we have to resist, writing letters to our representatives, boycotting companies that have capitulated, and staying informed, even as we feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of bad news. We gather with fellow citizens to protest—but there is so much to protest! Which issues should we focus on when there are emergencies on multiple fronts? Amid it all, we grieve for the loss of rights we thought were guaranteed–for the country we thought we were.

Kevin Young’s Night Watch—the Ink Book Club’s September pick—is largely the product of grief. Young began work on the poems nearly twenty years ago, after his father’s death, and the volume is dedicated to Young’s grandmother and two aunts, whose more recent deaths he is still mourning. “Poetry gives us a language through which to grieve,” he observes. “Grief is a language,” the poet recently told an audience at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. “One day you don’t speak it and the next it’s all you can talk about. Poetry helps you navigate the language of grief.”

Initially, Young had deemed some of the poems that comprise Night Watch “too dark.” Covid changed that. During lockdown, he pulled out the poems he’d stored away and reread them. Their darkness seemed newly apt. He decided to work on them and to compose others. His vision for a new collection began to emerge. Grief would be at its center.

The sources of grief Young is in conversation with in this volume are varied, as are those we bring to the book as its readers. There are poignant memories of loved ones lost, of injustices suffered, of homes left behind. Death looms, but what comes after, and how will we face it when it arrives at our door?

From “Rapture”

I want to be awake
When the world ends…

let those I love who left
Have only gone to the store,
running errands, this errant

unebbing life. After,
let what I’ve torn—
the myself I mourn—

be mended & start
over, like a scar,
or star.

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