The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks

by Brooks, Gwendolyn

• ISBN13: 9781931082877
• ISBN10: 1931082871
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781598533248
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-02-28
• Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE
• More Book Details

Summary

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 twentieth 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 that moves from her earliest work-including many of her important World War II poems-through the social and aesthetic upheavals of the 1960s up to her death in 2000.

Author Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most accomplished and acclaimed poets of the last century, the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first black woman to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—the forerunner of the U.S. Poet Laureate.

Elizabeth Alexander, editor of this volume, is the author of four books of poems, including American Sublime, and the essay collection The Black Interior. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She is a professor at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Kitchenette building	p. 1
The mother	p. 2
Hunchback girl : she thinks of heaven	p. 3
A song in the front yard	p. 4
The ballad of chocolate Mabbie	p. 5
The preacher : ruminates behind the sermon	p. 6
Sadie and Maud	p. 6
When you have forgotten Sunday : the love story of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery	p. 9
The vacant lot	p. 10
The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith	p. 10
Negro hero	p. 16
Ballad of Pearl May Lee	p. 18
Gay chaps at the bar	p. 23
Still do I keep my look, my identity ...	p. 23
My dreams, my works, must wait till after hell	p. 24
Looking	p. 25
Mentors	p. 25
The white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men	p. 26
Love note / I : surely	p. 26
The progress	p. 27
The birth in a narrow room	p. 28
Maxie Allen	p. 29
The parents : people like our marriage : Maxie and Andrew	p. 30
Sunday chicken	p. 30
Old relative	p. 31
Downtown vaudeville	p. 32
The ballad of late Annie	p. 32
Throwing out the flowers	p. 33
"Do not be afraid of no"	p. 34
"Pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps"	p. 35
My own sweet good	p. 35
The Anniad	p. 36
Appendix to The Anniad	p. 47
The children of the poor	p. 49
The rites for cousin Vit	p. 52
I love those little booths at Benvenuti's	p. 52
Beverly Hills, Chicago	p. 54
"One wants a teller in a time like this"	p. 56
"Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road"	p. 57
Strong men, riding horses	p. 59
The bean eaters	p. 60
We real cool	p. 60
Old Mary	p. 61
A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi : meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon	p. 61
The last quatrain of the ballad of Emmett Till	p. 68
The Chicago Defender sends a man to Little Rock	p. 68
The lovers of the poor	p. 71
The crazy woman	p. 74
A lovely love	p. 75
Bronzeville woman in a red hat	p. 75
Bessie of Bronzeville visits Mary and Norman at a beach-house in New Buffalo	p. 78
The ballad of Rudolph Reed	p. 79
The egg boiler	p. 82
A catch of shy fish	p. 83
Boy breaking glass	p. 88
Medgar Evers	p. 89
Malcom X	p. 90
The Chicago Picasso	p. 91
The wall	p. 92
The Blackstone rangers	p. 94
The sermon on the warpland	p. 97
The second sermon on the warpland	p. 98
Riot	p. 100
The third sermon on the warpland	p. 101
The life of Lincoln West	p. 106
To Don at Salaam	p. 112
Paul Robeson	p. 113
The boy died in my alley	p. 114
Steam song	p. 116
Elegy in a rainbow	p. 117
Primer for blacks	p. 118
To those of my sisters who kept their naturals	p. 120
The near-Johannesburg boy	p. 122
Shorthand possible	p. 124
Infirm	p. 125
The Coora flower	p. 126
Nineteen cows in a slow line walking	p. 127
I am a black	p. 128
Uncle Seagram	p. 129
Abruptly	p. 131
An old black woman, homeless, and indistinct	p. 132
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.