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To Repel Ghosts

To Repel Ghosts

List Price: $26.00
Your Price: $26.00
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: To repel stupid reviews
Review: Do Not Believe The Previous Reviewer. Of course this book is words, it's a book! Young, whose first book Most Way Home was impressive if uneven, has taken quite a leap forward in his poetic life. Basquiat morphs into something other than his paintings, he becomes Young's poems, he becomes a monster and a genius, he becomes something close to mythic.

This is not a picture book, you can't read poetry expecting to see images of the dead man's paintings, if you only want to read a description go and get a gallery catalogue!

Instead, here, immerse yourself in Kevin Young, a poet who imagines America through the prism of a single, talented young man. A masterful work (that I was lucky enough to see just before its publication, lucky me!). Cheers.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: To Repel Ghosts and Mortals too!
Review: I found To Repel Ghosts interestingly cryptic. Although Kevin Young is a fine writer whom I've favored in the past. There seems to be no growth or honesty in his writing. There are passages that are riddled with the voice of someone elses soul. It is not that of artist Jean Michele Basquiat. It is of Young trying to capture himself as something more than Young. I have seen many young writers fall into this dilema. It is unfortunate that Kevin Young try to romantazise a troubled artists life. Maybe because his own was such a privileged one.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: STREET ROMANCE ??????
Review: I read to Repel Ghosts and thought it was okay. It is a bit phony for someone like Kevin Young who comes from such a privileged life to write about street life as if he had ever experienced it. I sure did and this book felt like it totally romanticized Basquiat. I found little in Kevin Youngs own words. This book simply gives you a safe and untrue moment that is in a way enough for many, but not sincere enough for me.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Peruvian Maid?
Review: I wanted to enjoy "To Repel Ghosts" so much. I have seen many of Jean Michel basquiats paintings and drawings. He was as poetic visually as he was when writing his thoughts down. Kevin Youngs book suffers because he seems to want to live through Basquiats words...but that is all that they seem to be is words...without soul!!!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: rich and rewarding
Review: I'm mystified by some of these negative comments, which all seem to be either about some meta-conversation about the book (was Basquiat exploited? sure, but not by Kevin Young!) or its author (how the hell does anyone here know how poor or rich he was growing up?). Those who have actually read the book know how thoughtful, gorgous and rich it is; those who have not yet ought to, especially before writing barely-literate rants against it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Artist's Dilemma?
Review: Let me see if I understand the previous reviewers problem with this book. Much as he states that the words didn't do enough for him, the most straightforward attack seems to be that Kevin Young wasn't poor as a child! IS the reviewer suggesting that only poor people can write about poor people, Southerners about the South? It's a silly line of reasoning that eventually leads to everyone just telling their exact life story again and again. It's a very boring literary legacy that the modern age of poetry and prose believes that just because you say exactly how something happened you've done something profound. The most profound thing an artist can do is to take the incomprehensable world and polish it until we can see and understand it better. This is what Kevin Young was trying to do with the book and the degree of success or failure shouldn't have much to do with whether or not he born in a mansion or a mudhut.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: excellent
Review: This book is a powerful rumination on Basquiat's life and themes. The poetry is consistantly alive and amazingly free of flab for a book of over 300 pages.

Young takes the difficult task of responding to visual art in words and succeeds admirably. The selection of Basquiat as the subject is a suprisingly good one that allows Young to draw on the words and themes important to Basquiat. Young's use of Basquiat's painted slogans ties the experience of reading the book to the experience of viewing the paintings in an unmediated way. Basquiat's esoteric painted slogans work well in Young's clear accessible poems.

Basquiat's touchstones of boxing and jazz allow for detours that hint back to Basquiat's life and art. The long poem on the boxer Jack Johnson is particularly good.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: excellent
Review: This book is a powerful rumination on Basquiat's life and themes. The poetry is consistantly alive and amazingly free of flab for a book of over 300 pages.

Young takes the difficult task of responding to visual art in words and succeeds admirably. The selection of Basquiat as the subject is a suprisingly good one that allows Young to draw on the words and themes important to Basquiat. Young's use of Basquiat's painted slogans ties the experience of reading the book to the experience of viewing the paintings in an unmediated way. Basquiat's esoteric painted slogans work well in Young's clear accessible poems.

Basquiat's touchstones of boxing and jazz allow for detours that hint back to Basquiat's life and art. The long poem on the boxer Jack Johnson is particularly good.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: MORE GOOD WRITING?
Review: WOW, I have read all the previous reviews on Kevin Youngs' To Repel Ghosts and I hear two etremely different views. I read the book. I did not buy it and thought it was not worth buying. I agree that it is pretentious and nothing more than a romantic way of looking at Basquiat. I also agree that one doesn't need to be poor to write about the poor but the flip side to that is to understand more and not simply romanticise or exploit. Like painter, Julian Schnabels' film adaption of Basquiat(titled the same! I apploud those who champion Youngs' work. They are fighting for a voice that repels more than ghosts.


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