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Gwendolyn Brooks: A Street in Bronzeville (LOA eBook Classic)

“Brooks has a command over both the colloquial and the more austere rhythms. . . . There is a range of form: quatrains, free verse, ballads, sonnets—all appropriately controlled.”—Rolfe Humphries, The New York Times Book Review

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Influences “Nobody Knows My Name”: Manuel Muñoz on Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha
December 8, 2017

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. Here, in an exclusive Library of America E-Book Classic edition, is her groundbreaking first book of poems, a searing portrait of Chicago’s South Side. “I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street,” she later said. “There was my material.”
Table of Contents

A Street in Bronzeville
the old-marrieds
kitchenette building
the mother
southeast corner
when Mrs. Martin’s Booker T
the soft man
the funeral
hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven
a song in the front yard
patent leather
the ballad of chocolate Mabbie
the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon
Sadie and Maud
the independent man
obituary for a living lady
when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story
the murder
of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery
Matthew Cole
the vacant lot

The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith

Negro Hero

Hattie Scott
the end of the day
the date
at the hairdresser’s
when I die
the battle

Queen of the Blues

Ballad of Pearl May Lee

Gay Chaps at The Bar
gay chaps at the bar
“still do I keep my look, my identity . . .”
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
looking
piano after war
mentors
the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men
firstly inclined to take what it is told
“God works in a mysterious way”
love note I: surely
love note II: flags
the progress

Biographical Note

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71 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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