To Repel Ghosts

1980s Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat led a brief, admittedly glamorous and tragic life, finally joining "that stupid club" of cultural figures who self-destructed at an early age. To Repel Ghosts is Kevin Young's ambitious cycle of poems about, inspired by, and in homage to Basquiat. In structure and theme it is a double album, a jazz symphony containing riffs about-and extended rhapsodies of-a pantheon of black genius. Here are ballplayers, boxers, jazz greats: a kaleidoscope of lives emerging from the prism of Basquiat's paintings, which themselves refer to many of these figures, tragic icons who provide a unique foil to Basquiat's own bout with fame.