“‘Ledge’ is taken from a longer poetic sequence inspired by Dante [Alighieri]. My friend and fellow poet Robin Coste Lewis and I divided up ‘The Inferno’ and wrote our respective versions after I was asked by the Museum of Modern Art to respond to Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings based on ‘The Inferno,’ which a friend had read to the artist canto by canto, circle by circle. I happened to have grown up with the same John Ciardi translation that Rauschenberg heard and, in composing my cantos, incorporated the Dante I first encountered as a teenager, together with African American cosmologies and spirituals that grounded me. Without telling a soul, after the initial project I continued to write through the rest of The Divine Comedy. As its title suggests, ‘Ledge’ is from the ‘Purgatory’ section, which, in our current era of social and bodily strife—not unlike Dante’s own time—manages to offer some hard-won hope.”

—Kevin Young