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.
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