The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks: (american Poets Project #19) - Gwendolyn Brooks

nDiscover the most enduring works of legendary poet Gwendolyn Brooks--the first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize--in one collectible volume nIf you wanted a poem, wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing. From the life of Chicago's South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century.

Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts. n nHer formal range, writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.

That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry retains its power to move and surprise. n nAbout the American Poets Project nElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.n