I will admit that I have a hard time going to cemeteries. But I'm sort of going back in time with him to see when he's barely able to speak, but the things he says are so incredible, you know? Like, up, up, more, more - and then, you know, he's literally walking around in these graveyard with people whose namesake he is. YOUNG: In this book, he's really a toddler. And so I really wanted to capture the feeling of being with him, running around, the sweat, the heat.

But these are really - they're not quite family plots 'cause other folks are there, but they're really church plots and particular and personal, and they go way back. And of course, because of the segregated South, in a way, these are your own patches of land. And in my father's side, we've been in these parts of Louisiana for 200 years, so there's some very old graves, some carved by hand, as I describe. And so I went with my son, and we were there all together as a family looking at, you know, what was my dad's - some recent some old - and just going to these two graveyards that contain two histories. KEVIN YOUNG: Both my parents are from Louisiana, from northern and southern, which is, like, two different countries sometimes. He told our co-host Rachel Martin that several of his poems were inspired by his visits with his son to the cemeteries where some of their family members are buried. He has more than a dozen books in his name, including a new collection out today called 'Stones.' It's about memory and loss, his deep ties to the South and how he stays connected to the past. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them-of us-poetry can save.Kevin Young is always writing poems.

Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead. In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South-one poem, Kith, exploring that strange bedfellow of kin-the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. We sleep long, / if not sound, Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, Till the end/ we sing / into the wind. A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called one of the poetry stars of his generation (Los Angeles Times).

Stones by Kevin Young