Kevin Young, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and poetry editor of The New Yorker, collects poems of grief, memory, and persistence in this volume. Young reflects on the death of his father and on his own middle age, wandering through family history and the American South's landscapes of memory. The poems move between the personal losses of individual families and the collective losses inscribed in Southern soil, where ancestors lie in marked and unmarked graves. Young's language draws on blues traditions, spirituals, and the vernacular speech of his Georgia family while also engaging with literary traditions from elegies to sonnets. The collection includes poems about his children that balance grief for what has been lost with wonder at what emerges. Young writes about food, music, sports, and the ordinary textures of Black American life with the same attention he brings to historical trauma and personal sorrow. The title refers both to literal gravestones and to the burdens carried by the living. Readers will find here a poet working at the height of his powers, capable of devastating understatement and sudden swerves into unexpected beauty. These poems model how to hold grief without being consumed by it, finding in the specific details of one family's experience the materials for meditation on mortality and love.