Comments   Summary   Author Notes

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.