The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks by Elizabeth Alexander, Editor
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 wrote 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. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces her career in all its scope and unexpected stylistic shifts. “Her formal range,” writes Elizabeth Alexander, “is most impressive… She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.” By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry retains its power to move and surprise.
