{"product_id":"9781931082877","title":"The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"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 \u003ci\u003eA Street in Bronzeville\u003c\/i\u003e (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, \u003ci\u003eThe Essential Gwendolyn Brooks\u003c\/i\u003e traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Library of America","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47052492112112,"sku":"9781931082877","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781931082877_p0.jpg?v=1763640090","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781931082877","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}