A review by readbyrodkelly
Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks

4.0

Okay. I read GB in high school and a bit in undergrad as well, and I didn’t quite latch onto it. There was something a bit pedestrian about the format. At the time, I was into contemporary poets who wrote very freely, without rules and with very abstract themes. Upon returning to GB and her Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Annie Allen, I really was able to dig in and understand her genius. She takes the simple, the everyday life of this black woman, and really magnifies the various layers of complexity underneath her simplistic exterior. There’s some deep stuff here that takes a minute to sink in: the poems start off deceptively simple and then become quite lyrical and dense.