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Selected Poems (Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series)

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Form and Content

The first section of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Selected Poems is devoted to an investigation of the world that the poet has chosen to represent: “A Street in Bronzeville.” The street is dominated by women, as the presence of such figures as the mother, a hunchback girl, and Sadie and Maud indicates. The first poem in the sequence, “Kitchenette Building,” is a central one because it asks what the fate of a dream would be in this world. Would it penetrate the “onion fumes” of garbage and “fried potatoes”? The speaker wonders if it might be...

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