Kevin Young

Art-world phenomenon Jean-Michel Basquiat was prolific in his short lifetime, creating an exhilarating new art inspired by music, language, and black American cultural icons. To Repel Ghosts synchronizes the harmony and discord of Basquiat's canvases, adapting them as a bass line to improvise and play upon. Young renders ambitious, celebratory poetry of the everyday and the exalted—a double-album in verse, a jazz symphony, a hip-hop opera—taking Basquiat's funkified history and making it sing.

Reviews & Praise

Young creates a midway point between his own and Basquiat's vernaculars, an inspired bricolage of shiny borrowings, canny enjambments and angry popist elegy. Publishers Weekly