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half_book_and_co's review
4.0
A few years ago Terrance Hayes published a poem called “The Golden Shovel”. Reading the last word of each line from top to bottom one realizes these words constitute Gwendolyne Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool”. Hayes thus created at once a new poetic form and a powerful homage to Brooks.
Last year (2017) on June 7th, Brooks, who was the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, would have turned 100 years old. What better year to publish a huge poetry anthology in her honour? The editors, Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith, brought together plenty of wonderful poets like Malika Booker, Kwame Dawes, and Rita Dove who used Hayes Golden Shovel form to write new poems taking lines or whole poems by Brooks as their foundation. The results are heartfelt, exciting, beautiful. The echo of Brooks is obviously strong, but each poet takes their work in a different direction. As a reader, I especially loved to read poems which took the same lines but created so fundamentally different poems. Words, as this anthology seems to stress, can be re_assembled in so many ways, creating so many meanings. As in most bigger poetry collections, some works will resonate more with you than others, but overall it is a strong collection showcasing different writers and reminding the reader of the timelessness of Brooks lines and her importance today.
Last year (2017) on June 7th, Brooks, who was the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, would have turned 100 years old. What better year to publish a huge poetry anthology in her honour? The editors, Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith, brought together plenty of wonderful poets like Malika Booker, Kwame Dawes, and Rita Dove who used Hayes Golden Shovel form to write new poems taking lines or whole poems by Brooks as their foundation. The results are heartfelt, exciting, beautiful. The echo of Brooks is obviously strong, but each poet takes their work in a different direction. As a reader, I especially loved to read poems which took the same lines but created so fundamentally different poems. Words, as this anthology seems to stress, can be re_assembled in so many ways, creating so many meanings. As in most bigger poetry collections, some works will resonate more with you than others, but overall it is a strong collection showcasing different writers and reminding the reader of the timelessness of Brooks lines and her importance today.
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