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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem is less about race or gender and more about the fragile gift of childhood. Except for the poem’s extratextual frame—we know that this poem was the first in a cycle of 11 semi-autobiographical poems that drew from Brooks’s own experiences as a sensitive, introspective Black child coming of age in the Chicago’s working class Bronzeville neighborhoods in the years after World War II, when America was still very much a segregated nation—little in the poem suggests that we are dealing with anything but a tender, imaginative girl.
Her family is impoverished—the house is small (“pinchy” [Line 8]), cluttered with inexpensive objects, lacks indoor plumbing (no indoor toilet, no indoor running water), and has a tiny bug-thick yard scattered with empty cans and jars. This poem takes place before the child understands the dimensions of race. For her, the world is not yet black and white. The tension in the poem is not about race or gender. That slow-motion epiphany will come all too soon. The tension in the poem centers on the world as it is and the world that can be brought to life by the bold energy of the imagination. The
By Gwendolyn Brooks
A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon
Gwendolyn Brooks
A Sunset of the City
Gwendolyn Brooks
Boy Breaking Glass
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Cynthia in the Snow
Gwendolyn Brooks
Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
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Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)
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The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
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The Blackstone Rangers
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The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
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The Crazy Woman
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The Lovers of the Poor
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The Mother
Gwendolyn Brooks
the rites for Cousin Vit
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To Be in Love
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To The Diaspora
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Ulysses
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We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks