The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks: (American Poets Project #19)

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks: (American Poets Project #19)

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"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 <i>A Street in Bronzeville</i> (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, <i>The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks</i> traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.<br><br>"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.