Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago's South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks took her place as one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century, distilling modernist style through the sounds and shapes of a variety of African-American forms and Idioms. Now Elizabe[...]

"In the hands of Gwendolyn Brooks, old age is a diamond with many facets. Throughout her poetry Brooks has illuminated old age as a time of isolation and withdrawal, remembrance and continuity, poverty, vulnerability, even homelessness, exploitation, neglect, abandonment, marginalization and destruc[...]