Jelly Roll: A Blues
If I were rating the poems individually, they'd be four stars all the way, but as a collection this is simply too long. The poems' brilliance gets lost and they blend into one another. At the beginnings of sections I'd be re-energized in my reading but soon find myself on auto-pilot. I understand the short-lines and short stanzas Young chose to write many (most) of the poems in, but a shorter, more selective book would have allowed for those poems in different forms (or those that are longer) to give the book more shape. Maybe I'm not this book's ideal reader, but I wish I could have given individual poems their due.
