| The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks: (American Poets Project #19) Contributor(s): Brooks, Gwendolyn (Author), Alexander, Elizabeth (Editor) |
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ISBN: 1931082871 ISBN-13: 9781931082877 Publisher: Library of America OUR PRICE: $18.00 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: May 2013 Annotation: Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago's South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks took her place as one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century, distilling modernist style through the sounds and shapes of a variety of African-American forms and Idioms. Now Elizabeth Alexander, one of our leading experts on African-American literature and culture, presents a sweeping new selection of Brooks's poetry. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Poetry | American - African American - Poetry | Women Authors |
| Dewey: 811.54 |
| LCCN: 2005044162 |
| Series: American Poets Project |
| Physical Information: 0.56" H x 4.6" W x 7.86" (0.68 lbs) 174 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Discover the most enduring works of legendary poet Gwendolyn Brooks--the first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize--in one collectible volume If 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. Her 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. About the American Poets Project Elegantly 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. |