A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun

Starred review from May 15, 2017
Jackson presents an incisive portrait of poet Gwendolyn Brooks (19172000), sharing with her subject the experiences of an African American woman poet in Chicago. Jackson brings us into Brooks' childhood home of limited finances but boundless love for a girl enthralled by books and dedicated to writing. Brooks published her first poem at age 11 and as a teen often contributed to the Chicago Defender. Maligned for her dark skin, Brooks channeled that indelible lesson in the insidiousness of racism into her poetry, forthrightly exploring complex and sensitive aspects of black lives, especially those of black women. Continually honing her technique and making astonishing imaginative and empathetic leaps, Brooks attained recognition never before accorded an African American woman writer as she strove to be a nurturing wife, mother, and teacher as well as a poet, and generously established prizes for young writers. Jackson traces Brooks' close relationships, her essential role in the Black Arts Movement, and her leaving the white publishing establishment in 1968 for independent black presses, even self-publishing her work. Jackson's sensitive portrait of this quiet genius and her finely calibrated insights into her writing celebrate Brooks' warmth, her bitter bite, her slicing sarcasm, and the revolutionary provocation and power of her courageous, caring, intricately faceted poems, poems to read and reread for their emotional, social, and moral repercussionsand for their expounding beauty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)