Great Regulars: The granddaughter of a runaway slave,

[Gwendolyn] Brooks was anointed into verse when her one-time schoolteacher mother took her to see Langston Hughes, who steered her to modernists like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. No doubt their poems influenced her, as did the urban, streetwise Chicago school of writing. The way the speaker below is wholly absorbed by her lover echoes the work of metaphysical poet John Donne; her oddball punctuation recalls Emily Dickinson's poems. But Brooks is her own phylum.

To Be in Love

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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