What do you think?
Rate this book
Annie Allen
Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks. 1971 reprint edition published by Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet and teacher. She was the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, for her second collection, Annie Allen.
70 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
16 people are currently reading
2371 people want to read
About the author
Gwendolyn Brooks
125 books563 followersGwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated Black poets. She also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position. She was the poet laureate for the state of Illinois for over thirty years, a National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works include We Are Shining, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
December 30, 2016
Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Annie Allen in 1950, making her the first African American woman to win the illustrious award. A sequel to her Street Called Bronzeville, Annie Allen continues to describe in detail the African American experience during the late 1940s. Through her expressive language, Brooks relates how African Americans navigated post war America, and this vivid collection has stood the test of time.
Annie Allen and her mother are one of many signature poems in this collection. Brooks describes what both daughter and mother hope for in their life, for good and bad. Using her poetry as a platform, Brooks expresses how she hopes that Annie Allen finds a stable marriage to a black soldier returning from war. He should be a steady family man who is ready to settle down and live the American dream. Brooks' language is sad yet hopeful as Annie's parents relay what knowledge they have in hopes that their daughter has a brighter future than they did.
The centerpiece of this collection is The Anniad. A ballad, the Anniad describes in detail the experience of a soldier both on the front and after his return. His adjustment to life in the African American community can at times be trying, but Brooks hopes that he does not turn to alcoholism as a means to get through the rigors of life. She has seen many men in her community fall prey to both whiskey and womanizing and desires that these soldiers do more with their lives than repeat the community's habits. Depressing in language at times, The Anniad relays the feeling that African Americans should attempt to live the American dream after fighting to defeat fascism abroad.
Following the Anniad, the language starts to flow and become upbeat. Brooks urges her brothers and sisters to make the church and the barbershop the safe centers of their lives rather than languishing on the street. Rather than performing as clowns in front of white audiences, soldiers should take advantage of the GI bill and move forward with their lives. Published two years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, Brooks is perhaps using him as an example to show that anything is possible. As a result, the poems in the second half of the collection become more positive in language.
Gwendolyn Brooks paved the way for generations of African American women to express their feelings through poetry, most notably Audre Lorde in her work Sister, Outsider. Named a poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and holding the position until her death in 2000, Brooks became the torch bearer for young poets throughout the state. A remarkable woman, Brooks has had many Chicago institutions named for her. Annie Allen is much deserving of its awards and is a poetry collection that should be widely read and studied.
Annie Allen and her mother are one of many signature poems in this collection. Brooks describes what both daughter and mother hope for in their life, for good and bad. Using her poetry as a platform, Brooks expresses how she hopes that Annie Allen finds a stable marriage to a black soldier returning from war. He should be a steady family man who is ready to settle down and live the American dream. Brooks' language is sad yet hopeful as Annie's parents relay what knowledge they have in hopes that their daughter has a brighter future than they did.
The centerpiece of this collection is The Anniad. A ballad, the Anniad describes in detail the experience of a soldier both on the front and after his return. His adjustment to life in the African American community can at times be trying, but Brooks hopes that he does not turn to alcoholism as a means to get through the rigors of life. She has seen many men in her community fall prey to both whiskey and womanizing and desires that these soldiers do more with their lives than repeat the community's habits. Depressing in language at times, The Anniad relays the feeling that African Americans should attempt to live the American dream after fighting to defeat fascism abroad.
Following the Anniad, the language starts to flow and become upbeat. Brooks urges her brothers and sisters to make the church and the barbershop the safe centers of their lives rather than languishing on the street. Rather than performing as clowns in front of white audiences, soldiers should take advantage of the GI bill and move forward with their lives. Published two years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, Brooks is perhaps using him as an example to show that anything is possible. As a result, the poems in the second half of the collection become more positive in language.
Gwendolyn Brooks paved the way for generations of African American women to express their feelings through poetry, most notably Audre Lorde in her work Sister, Outsider. Named a poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and holding the position until her death in 2000, Brooks became the torch bearer for young poets throughout the state. A remarkable woman, Brooks has had many Chicago institutions named for her. Annie Allen is much deserving of its awards and is a poetry collection that should be widely read and studied.
April 5, 2025
Annie Allen is a hero for our times, and for all time – even though she is not rich or famous, even though she does not sing before large audiences or play roles in movies. Rather, Annie Allen is a hero because she learns and grows and endures – like so many of the ordinary people whose lives and travails Gwendolyn Brooks chronicled in some of the greatest American poetry ever written. Brooks’s collection Annie Allen won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1949 – Brooks was the first African American writer ever to receive the honour – and is a characteristically brilliant example of her work.
Brooks spent virtually all of her life in Chicago, and devoted her literary career to chronicling in poetic form the lives of people whose stories, too often, had not been told or listened to – ordinary African Americans of Chicago, hard-working people with not much money or luck, but with a great deal of inner strength and integrity.
Annie Allen is divided into three main sections. The first section, “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” starts with Annie’s birth, and shares what she learned from her parents Maxie and Andrew, along with conveying impressions of everything from a Sunday chicken dinner to a vaudeville show that features cruel caricatures of African American life. The eleven-part poem concludes with “my own sweet good,” a poem that seems to show Annie Allen, on the cusp of womanhood, focusing on a man in whom she is interested:
“Somewhere, you lattice my berries with bran,
Readying for riding my way.
You kiss all the great-lipped girls that you can.
If only they knew that it’s little today
And nothing tomorrow to take or to pay,
For sake of a promise so golden, gay,
For promise so golden and gay.” (p. 15)
This excerpt from “my own sweet good” captures part of what I so admire about Brooks’s poetry – the subtle, unaffected rhyme scheme; the inspired repetition of the rhyming couplet at the end; the way the stanza conveys the joy of a young woman who senses that the young man who is popular with all the young ladies is choosing her.
The next section of the book is titled “The Anniad.” I sensed the classical allusion at once, and immediately thought of Homer’s Iliad. Yet the more apt allusional path for me to have followed – as I realized after having read a bit of the scholarship on the book – would have been to think of Virgil’s Aeneid. It’s a lovely bit of assonance -- Aeneid/”Anniad” – and it frames well what is truly a heroic poem.
Yet the heroism of the “Anniad” is not that of an Aeneas – carrying his father on his back out of a burning city, descending into the Underworld to gain secret knowledge, fighting the King of the Rutuli in single combat to decide the fate of two empires. Annie Allen’s heroism, like that of many of the characters whose stories are told in Brooks’s poetry, is the heroism of a woman who stays at home, suffers, learns, and endures.
“The Anniad” tells how the man Annie loves goes off to war (like Aeneas) and is undone by the experience (unlike Aeneas), leaving Annie to go on with life alone. Passages of the poem convey how the seasons pass while Annie seeks different ways to carry on with her life in spite of her feelings of loneliness and doubt.
I was particularly moved by a three-part “Appendix to the Anniad” that bears the subtitle “leaves from a loose-leaf war diary.” The last part, titled “the sonnet-ballad,” is one of the most moving things that I have ever read, as Annie Allen looks back at her experience of love and loss:
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won’t be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate – and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? (p. 32)
The five-part poem “the children of the poor” is included on the Great Books List of Saint John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland – and I can see why the curators of the GBL included it, as it is a characteristically graceful and empathetic example of Brooks’s work. The speaker of the poem begins by remarking that “People who have no children can be hard:/Attain a mail of ice and insolence” (p. 35); the childless, she suggests, have that luxury of detaching from feeling, in contrast to parents who “through a throttling dark…hear/The little lifting helplessness, the queer/Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous/Lost softness makes a trap for us” (p. 35). The situation, the speaker suggests, is particularly acute for people who are poor, and/or who come from a cultural-minority background: “What shall I give my children? who are poor,/Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land” (p. 36).
The poem “the rites for Cousin Vit” is one of those poems that gets referred to as “frequently anthologized”, because indeed it does appear in a great many literature anthologies, like the one I customarily use when teaching my English 201 (Reading and Writing About Text) course at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Perhaps the reason this poem is so frequently anthologized is that, again, Brooks celebrates the everyday heroism of someone who lived with spirit and was true to herself even though she had none of the advantages that can be portioned out, in American society, in terms of factors like income level and skin tone.
We know that Cousin Vit has died – someone “Carried her unprotesting out the door./Kicked back the casket-stand” – but then the speaker assures us that the coffin “can’t hold her,/That stuff and satin aiming to unfold her”. We are assured that Cousin Vit “rises in the sunshine. There she goes,/Back to the bars she knew and the repose/In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes” (p. 45). Cousin Vit’s vitality (a word that Brooks may well have had in mind whilst composing this poem) is not diminished or cancelled out by the fact of her demise. Indeed, through the last word of the poem Brooks emphasizes that Cousin Vit “Is” – not “was.”
This review can only hint at the glorious richness of this masterwork of poetic diction and humane compassion. The last four lines of the fifteen-part “The Womanhood,” with which Annie Allen closes, provide a fine valedictory, in which Brooks, through Annie Allen, seems to be speaking to us, suggesting a philosophy of life that may help all of us – and especially those of us who have dealt and are dealing with poverty and prejudice – to make our way along:
Rise.
Let us combine. There are no magics or elves
Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must
Wizard a track through our own screaming weed. (p. 60)
It is a mic-drop conclusion (though, as far as I know, people didn’t use that term in 1949) if ever there was one.
Brooks spent virtually all of her life in Chicago, and devoted her literary career to chronicling in poetic form the lives of people whose stories, too often, had not been told or listened to – ordinary African Americans of Chicago, hard-working people with not much money or luck, but with a great deal of inner strength and integrity.
Annie Allen is divided into three main sections. The first section, “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” starts with Annie’s birth, and shares what she learned from her parents Maxie and Andrew, along with conveying impressions of everything from a Sunday chicken dinner to a vaudeville show that features cruel caricatures of African American life. The eleven-part poem concludes with “my own sweet good,” a poem that seems to show Annie Allen, on the cusp of womanhood, focusing on a man in whom she is interested:
“Somewhere, you lattice my berries with bran,
Readying for riding my way.
You kiss all the great-lipped girls that you can.
If only they knew that it’s little today
And nothing tomorrow to take or to pay,
For sake of a promise so golden, gay,
For promise so golden and gay.” (p. 15)
This excerpt from “my own sweet good” captures part of what I so admire about Brooks’s poetry – the subtle, unaffected rhyme scheme; the inspired repetition of the rhyming couplet at the end; the way the stanza conveys the joy of a young woman who senses that the young man who is popular with all the young ladies is choosing her.
The next section of the book is titled “The Anniad.” I sensed the classical allusion at once, and immediately thought of Homer’s Iliad. Yet the more apt allusional path for me to have followed – as I realized after having read a bit of the scholarship on the book – would have been to think of Virgil’s Aeneid. It’s a lovely bit of assonance -- Aeneid/”Anniad” – and it frames well what is truly a heroic poem.
Yet the heroism of the “Anniad” is not that of an Aeneas – carrying his father on his back out of a burning city, descending into the Underworld to gain secret knowledge, fighting the King of the Rutuli in single combat to decide the fate of two empires. Annie Allen’s heroism, like that of many of the characters whose stories are told in Brooks’s poetry, is the heroism of a woman who stays at home, suffers, learns, and endures.
“The Anniad” tells how the man Annie loves goes off to war (like Aeneas) and is undone by the experience (unlike Aeneas), leaving Annie to go on with life alone. Passages of the poem convey how the seasons pass while Annie seeks different ways to carry on with her life in spite of her feelings of loneliness and doubt.
I was particularly moved by a three-part “Appendix to the Anniad” that bears the subtitle “leaves from a loose-leaf war diary.” The last part, titled “the sonnet-ballad,” is one of the most moving things that I have ever read, as Annie Allen looks back at her experience of love and loss:
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won’t be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate – and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? (p. 32)
The five-part poem “the children of the poor” is included on the Great Books List of Saint John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland – and I can see why the curators of the GBL included it, as it is a characteristically graceful and empathetic example of Brooks’s work. The speaker of the poem begins by remarking that “People who have no children can be hard:/Attain a mail of ice and insolence” (p. 35); the childless, she suggests, have that luxury of detaching from feeling, in contrast to parents who “through a throttling dark…hear/The little lifting helplessness, the queer/Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous/Lost softness makes a trap for us” (p. 35). The situation, the speaker suggests, is particularly acute for people who are poor, and/or who come from a cultural-minority background: “What shall I give my children? who are poor,/Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land” (p. 36).
The poem “the rites for Cousin Vit” is one of those poems that gets referred to as “frequently anthologized”, because indeed it does appear in a great many literature anthologies, like the one I customarily use when teaching my English 201 (Reading and Writing About Text) course at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Perhaps the reason this poem is so frequently anthologized is that, again, Brooks celebrates the everyday heroism of someone who lived with spirit and was true to herself even though she had none of the advantages that can be portioned out, in American society, in terms of factors like income level and skin tone.
We know that Cousin Vit has died – someone “Carried her unprotesting out the door./Kicked back the casket-stand” – but then the speaker assures us that the coffin “can’t hold her,/That stuff and satin aiming to unfold her”. We are assured that Cousin Vit “rises in the sunshine. There she goes,/Back to the bars she knew and the repose/In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes” (p. 45). Cousin Vit’s vitality (a word that Brooks may well have had in mind whilst composing this poem) is not diminished or cancelled out by the fact of her demise. Indeed, through the last word of the poem Brooks emphasizes that Cousin Vit “Is” – not “was.”
This review can only hint at the glorious richness of this masterwork of poetic diction and humane compassion. The last four lines of the fifteen-part “The Womanhood,” with which Annie Allen closes, provide a fine valedictory, in which Brooks, through Annie Allen, seems to be speaking to us, suggesting a philosophy of life that may help all of us – and especially those of us who have dealt and are dealing with poverty and prejudice – to make our way along:
Rise.
Let us combine. There are no magics or elves
Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must
Wizard a track through our own screaming weed. (p. 60)
It is a mic-drop conclusion (though, as far as I know, people didn’t use that term in 1949) if ever there was one.
March 27, 2018
Okay. I read GB in high school and a bit in undergrad as well, and I didn’t quite latch onto it. There was something a bit pedestrian about the format. At the time, I was into contemporary poets who wrote very freely, without rules and with very abstract themes. Upon returning to GB and her Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Annie Allen, I really was able to dig in and understand her genius. She takes the simple, the everyday life of this black woman, and really magnifies the various layers of complexity underneath her simplistic exterior. There’s some deep stuff here that takes a minute to sink in: the poems start off deceptively simple and then become quite lyrical and dense.
September 14, 2025
It's sad that a review has yet to be written for Gwendolyn Brooks' "Annie Allen." There's not even a cover picture for the book yet. Brooks is known for her highly anthologized poem "We Real Cool," and this collection is a great way to get acquainted with her earlier poetry and begin to become familiarized with her extensive body of work. "Annie Allen" won the Pulitzer in 1950, which is not the least bit surprising considering her work. Her words are striking and fluid and the poems are masterfully crafted. The poems have an expansive range of ideas, moments, and structures. They delve into childhood, womanhood, race and the passing of tradition. Her sounds and rhythms feel like they were heavily influenced by Mr. Manley Hopkins himself. Hopkins was awesome and I am interested to know if anyone can see other influences in this work.
February 23, 2018
This is an award-winning and history-making book of poetry from 1945. It was well outside of my comfort zone, but I still found tons to enjoy.
There were a few poems that completely captured an emotion or a moment which I really loved such as "do not be afraid of no" and "pygmies are pygmies still though percht on Alps."
There were two that also captured the idea of privilege and the request for consideration of an issue without devaluing other issues a la the Black Lives Matter or #metoo movements that resounded with me deeply. It's at once so comforting and enraging to know that none of these issues are new, it's just that my skinfolk are so good at repressing narratives that make them worried that if we share power, we'll be treated like we've treated others for hundreds of years.
Thought-provoking, beautifully worded and evocative. I'm not sure poetry will become a mainstay of my literary diet, but this was a great treat.
There were a few poems that completely captured an emotion or a moment which I really loved such as "do not be afraid of no" and "pygmies are pygmies still though percht on Alps."
There were two that also captured the idea of privilege and the request for consideration of an issue without devaluing other issues a la the Black Lives Matter or #metoo movements that resounded with me deeply. It's at once so comforting and enraging to know that none of these issues are new, it's just that my skinfolk are so good at repressing narratives that make them worried that if we share power, we'll be treated like we've treated others for hundreds of years.
Thought-provoking, beautifully worded and evocative. I'm not sure poetry will become a mainstay of my literary diet, but this was a great treat.
April 14, 2018
I’m in love with the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. I’m happy to have found her words, finally, but sad to have gone so long without them. This volume is slim, but the poems are rich thematically and the language is complex, even in the deceptively simple sing-song verses.
October 30, 2021
A bit of a sophomore slump at the outset, but manages to salvage things bottom of the ninth and stick the landing quite superbly. (To atrociously mix metaphors.)
February 5, 2019
I opened this musical book with an innocent question: why was Gwendolyn Brooks never celebrated among my poetry-loving friends? It could have been the company I kept, but when I was studying in undergrad, it felt that my friends had run the gauntlet of artistic obsessions, and never quite landed upon Brooks. Now, upon reading her, I see how her work denies the young contemporary poet twofold: first, she denies them the feeling of being “in the know” – her work does not open to understanding without conjecture, without risk (how else does one make sense of a line: “Do not be afraid of no, / Who has so far so very far to go” (12)?). Second, she denies young aspiring poets their seeming to others to be in the know, writing as she does in a rhyming, twisting, formal idiom that at times resembles the nursery rhyme. But Brooks is not easy by any means; she defies the nursery rhyme with a mind like a whittling knife.
The moment one opens Annie Allen, one knows that they are in the presence of a genius of lyric. Brooks is quick in two senses of the word – quick-witted, of course, but also quick to move to meaning; her poems leap from word to word and sometimes develop so quickly that they threaten to leave the reader behind: “First fight. Then fiddle” becomes the opening thesis statement of a poem that later spools out that meaning: “Rise… for having first to civilize a space / Wherein to play your violin with grace” (38). To read Brooks is to always be on the edge of one’s seat, so to speak, as she develops her poems the way Annie Allen’s son develops himself: “His lesions are legion. / But reaching is his rule” (40). And Brooks displays her reach through her verbal resourcefulness, always choosing the far-flung object or adjective to add to her clamorous mix: “the milk-glass fruit bowl, iron pot… yellow apron and spilling pretty cherries” (3). These literary objects form the imaginative collection related to “the birth in a narrow room,” her opening poem.
But as the imagined Annie develops throughout the book in three distinct sections (“Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad” and “The Womanhood”), the poems slough off their object-loving characters and become exercises in personal thought, in the lyric “I”: “Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road… Grant me that I am human, that I hurt, / That I can cry” (59). We watch Annie move from being implied by a collection of objects (as in “the birth in a narrow room”) to developing and defending her own selfhood (“Men of careful turns”).
What is laudatory in Brooks is endless, but I’ll relay here one small nut of encouragement that I found in her work: her use of homegrown forms. The compact poem, “the rites for Cousin Vit,” for example, exhibits a lovely concord between form and content, as the poem follows the funeral rites for a relative whose vivaciousness seems to threaten death’s finality: “Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, / She rises in the sunshine” (45). But the rhyme scheme mimics the casket as a container, perhaps even stretching at its seams: ABBA ABBA ABCCAB. The stretch, the reach, seems Brooks’s native tongue, and we – as in this line rounding off the poem about Cousin Vit – often reap the rewards: “In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge / Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is” (45).
The moment one opens Annie Allen, one knows that they are in the presence of a genius of lyric. Brooks is quick in two senses of the word – quick-witted, of course, but also quick to move to meaning; her poems leap from word to word and sometimes develop so quickly that they threaten to leave the reader behind: “First fight. Then fiddle” becomes the opening thesis statement of a poem that later spools out that meaning: “Rise… for having first to civilize a space / Wherein to play your violin with grace” (38). To read Brooks is to always be on the edge of one’s seat, so to speak, as she develops her poems the way Annie Allen’s son develops himself: “His lesions are legion. / But reaching is his rule” (40). And Brooks displays her reach through her verbal resourcefulness, always choosing the far-flung object or adjective to add to her clamorous mix: “the milk-glass fruit bowl, iron pot… yellow apron and spilling pretty cherries” (3). These literary objects form the imaginative collection related to “the birth in a narrow room,” her opening poem.
But as the imagined Annie develops throughout the book in three distinct sections (“Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad” and “The Womanhood”), the poems slough off their object-loving characters and become exercises in personal thought, in the lyric “I”: “Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road… Grant me that I am human, that I hurt, / That I can cry” (59). We watch Annie move from being implied by a collection of objects (as in “the birth in a narrow room”) to developing and defending her own selfhood (“Men of careful turns”).
What is laudatory in Brooks is endless, but I’ll relay here one small nut of encouragement that I found in her work: her use of homegrown forms. The compact poem, “the rites for Cousin Vit,” for example, exhibits a lovely concord between form and content, as the poem follows the funeral rites for a relative whose vivaciousness seems to threaten death’s finality: “Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, / She rises in the sunshine” (45). But the rhyme scheme mimics the casket as a container, perhaps even stretching at its seams: ABBA ABBA ABCCAB. The stretch, the reach, seems Brooks’s native tongue, and we – as in this line rounding off the poem about Cousin Vit – often reap the rewards: “In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge / Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is” (45).
November 5, 2022
3.5
Major respect to Gwendolyn Brooks (obviously). I just found more that I appreciated rather than felt. It doesn't help that the first third of the collection feels substantially weaker than the latter two. "The Anniad" (second part) is probably the highlight of the collection for me. A longer poem about love, war, infidelity, insecurity, and making a poor Black woman into a mythic figure of resilience and struggle. I know it's in response to Virgil, but the strife felt so Sisyphean to me. Anyway, Brooks has such an incredible understanding of rhythm. She basically writes songs without music; somehow, as you dive deeper into the poem, her deliberate tempo simply overtakes you.
Some quotes I enjoyed:
the rites for Cousin Vit
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
_________
What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.
__________
Appendix to The Anniad
leaves from a loose-leaf war diary
1
("thousands-killed in action")
You need the untranslatable ice to watch.
You need to loiter a little among the vague
Hushes, the clever evasions of the vagueness
Above the healthy energy of decay.
You need the untranslatable ice to watch,
The purple and black to smell
Before your horror can be sweet.
Or proper.
Before your grief is other than discreet.
The intellectual damn
Will nurse your half-hurt. Quickly you are well.
But weary. How you yawn, have yet to see
Why nothing exhausts you like this sympathy.
__________
from "The Anniad"
Not that woman! (Not that room!
Not that dusted demi-gloom!)
Nothing limpid, nothing meek
But a gorgeous and gold shriek
With her tongue tucked in her cheek,
Hissing gauzes in her gaze,
Coiling oil upon her ways.
Gets a maple banshee. Gets
A sleek slit-eyed gypsy moan.
Oh those violent vinaigrettes!
Oh bad honey that can hone
Oilily the bluntest stone!
Oh mad bacchanalian lass
That his random passion has!
Think of sweet and chocolate
Minus passing-magistrate,
Minus passing-lofty light,
Minus passing-stars for night,
Sirocco wafts and tra la la,
Minus symbol, cinema
Mirages, all things suave and bright.
Major respect to Gwendolyn Brooks (obviously). I just found more that I appreciated rather than felt. It doesn't help that the first third of the collection feels substantially weaker than the latter two. "The Anniad" (second part) is probably the highlight of the collection for me. A longer poem about love, war, infidelity, insecurity, and making a poor Black woman into a mythic figure of resilience and struggle. I know it's in response to Virgil, but the strife felt so Sisyphean to me. Anyway, Brooks has such an incredible understanding of rhythm. She basically writes songs without music; somehow, as you dive deeper into the poem, her deliberate tempo simply overtakes you.
Some quotes I enjoyed:
the rites for Cousin Vit
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
_________
What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.
__________
Appendix to The Anniad
leaves from a loose-leaf war diary
1
("thousands-killed in action")
You need the untranslatable ice to watch.
You need to loiter a little among the vague
Hushes, the clever evasions of the vagueness
Above the healthy energy of decay.
You need the untranslatable ice to watch,
The purple and black to smell
Before your horror can be sweet.
Or proper.
Before your grief is other than discreet.
The intellectual damn
Will nurse your half-hurt. Quickly you are well.
But weary. How you yawn, have yet to see
Why nothing exhausts you like this sympathy.
__________
from "The Anniad"
Not that woman! (Not that room!
Not that dusted demi-gloom!)
Nothing limpid, nothing meek
But a gorgeous and gold shriek
With her tongue tucked in her cheek,
Hissing gauzes in her gaze,
Coiling oil upon her ways.
Gets a maple banshee. Gets
A sleek slit-eyed gypsy moan.
Oh those violent vinaigrettes!
Oh bad honey that can hone
Oilily the bluntest stone!
Oh mad bacchanalian lass
That his random passion has!
Think of sweet and chocolate
Minus passing-magistrate,
Minus passing-lofty light,
Minus passing-stars for night,
Sirocco wafts and tra la la,
Minus symbol, cinema
Mirages, all things suave and bright.
November 18, 2023
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gush or gold it will not come.
Again in this identical disguise.
_ _ _ _ _
Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, for this book. I confess I am not an aficionado of poetry, but this was quite a striking collection of verse. What I love about poetry is it slows me down, makes me consider multiple ways of reading a line, where to put the emphasis, the sounds of the words in addition to the meaning and then if I can the-sounds-and-the-meanings. Poem X (quoted above) struck me as especially poignant. "The Anniad" was dazzlingly technical, I was mesmerized by the shifting rhyme scheme.
I will be reading more Gwendolyn Brooks -- I've reserved A Street in Bronzeville; I'm reading her book for children Bronzeville Boys and Girls and it is delightful!
A note on editions: the more widely available Selected Poems only contains a partial selection of what is in Annie Allen. I wanted to read the complete, unabridged version of the poems that earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize, so I tracked down the 1971 reprint of the original.
And be it gush or gold it will not come.
Again in this identical disguise.
_ _ _ _ _
Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, for this book. I confess I am not an aficionado of poetry, but this was quite a striking collection of verse. What I love about poetry is it slows me down, makes me consider multiple ways of reading a line, where to put the emphasis, the sounds of the words in addition to the meaning and then if I can the-sounds-and-the-meanings. Poem X (quoted above) struck me as especially poignant. "The Anniad" was dazzlingly technical, I was mesmerized by the shifting rhyme scheme.
I will be reading more Gwendolyn Brooks -- I've reserved A Street in Bronzeville; I'm reading her book for children Bronzeville Boys and Girls and it is delightful!
A note on editions: the more widely available Selected Poems only contains a partial selection of what is in Annie Allen. I wanted to read the complete, unabridged version of the poems that earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize, so I tracked down the 1971 reprint of the original.
August 27, 2020
I haven't read much poetry aside from collections for children, so this was almost a new experience for me.
I listened to some audio recordings of Gwendolyn Brooks reading her poetry before reading this, and in many passages I could hear her voice in my head.
I fully admit that much of this volume left me puzzled and lost -- not in a "lost in thought" sort of way, but "was that just English? I don't get it." sort of lost. But some lines resonated, and I have gone back to read them over and over.
I think my favorite of this collection is "One wants a Teller in a time like this" (easy to find with Google).
I listened to some audio recordings of Gwendolyn Brooks reading her poetry before reading this, and in many passages I could hear her voice in my head.
I fully admit that much of this volume left me puzzled and lost -- not in a "lost in thought" sort of way, but "was that just English? I don't get it." sort of lost. But some lines resonated, and I have gone back to read them over and over.
I think my favorite of this collection is "One wants a Teller in a time like this" (easy to find with Google).
December 31, 2019
I was really impressed with this collection I had never heard of, although I am otherwise well-versed on Brook’s “greatest hits.” Annie Allen felt much more modernist than the work I’ve read from her before, which I guess makes sense based on the time period, but there is still plenty of Brooks in each poem, reflecting on space, race, and gender.
The long poem “Anniad” had too many wonderful lines, couplets, and stanzas to mention here and had both a beautiful sound and rich imagery. “The Womanhood” has equally as interesting of lines. This is definitely a collection I’d like to revisit and consider how to use in the classroom.
The long poem “Anniad” had too many wonderful lines, couplets, and stanzas to mention here and had both a beautiful sound and rich imagery. “The Womanhood” has equally as interesting of lines. This is definitely a collection I’d like to revisit and consider how to use in the classroom.
September 22, 2018
This book is a long poem divided into three main sections. From birth to womanhood, the story of Annie Allen. It is very different to review a book like this, however, I find the use of poetry to tell a beautiful story. Brooks also has a masterful command of the English language. The language she uses weaves wonderfully and creates a story of self-actualization. Quick read and I enjoyed it.
Want to read
December 23, 2016* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)
* 50 Books That Every African American Should Read
Book of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks that was published in 1949, and for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. This made her the first African American to ever receive a Pulitzer Prize.
* 50 Books That Every African American Should Read
Book of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks that was published in 1949, and for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. This made her the first African American to ever receive a Pulitzer Prize.
January 25, 2015
Only two or so poems really spoke to me, but that doesn't mean it's bad however.
January 24, 2016
Not my Lipton
August 8, 2016
I did not enjoy this book at all, but I think it is my lack of understand poetry.
November 15, 2018
“Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies./ and be it gash or gold it will not come/ Again in this identical disguise.”
January 25, 2021
I feel like my critique of most poetry books is that since they are typically short (as this one is) all the poems need to be really good. There's not necessarily any bad poems here (although it's a shame she felt she had to rhyme, but back then there was a lot less willingness to do free form), but there are some poems that left me non-plussed. What I appreciated as I went along though was that Brooks did not feel compelled to make every poem "about" race/racism. I think too often Black writers are expected to be saying something about race and if they don't it's seen as insignificant. But I also like that there is some stuff more explicitly about racism here as I do think it's a missed opportunity to have no commentary on the role of racism (and that goes for writers of any color). There's a good balance here.
I ultimately was somewhat underwhelmed overall but the poems that hit really hit ("Beverly Hills, Chicago" is probably the best of the collection for my money), and even the ones that missed are competent enough as poems not to drag the collection down. I also think there was something interesting going on thematically with the idea of the next generation having a chance to be better than the last, mostly it seems by learning from their mistakes and taking chances where they were unable or unwilling to. That is definitely a major theme in at least some African American literature.
I ultimately was somewhat underwhelmed overall but the poems that hit really hit ("Beverly Hills, Chicago" is probably the best of the collection for my money), and even the ones that missed are competent enough as poems not to drag the collection down. I also think there was something interesting going on thematically with the idea of the next generation having a chance to be better than the last, mostly it seems by learning from their mistakes and taking chances where they were unable or unwilling to. That is definitely a major theme in at least some African American literature.
June 8, 2023
Just an absolutely stunning work of poetry. I see why it was awarded the Pulitzer.
Favorite quote:
"True, there is silver under
The veils of the darkness.
But few care to dig in the night
For the possible treasures of stars."
Favorite quote:
"True, there is silver under
The veils of the darkness.
But few care to dig in the night
For the possible treasures of stars."
October 10, 2019
I love poetry I don't understand the first time through.
Want to read
March 17, 2023This is the sequel to Street to Bronzeville
August 8, 2023
Very deep!!!
August 27, 2023
Vivid imagery!
(I read a pdf of this or at least a close version that I found online.)
(I read a pdf of this or at least a close version that I found online.)
November 21, 2024
I read the new edition by Brooks Permissions.
February 11, 2025
7/10
The central longer poem, ‘The Anniad’, was one of the best poems I’ve ever read but I didn’t latch on to much else in this collection.
The George Rashbrook year of poetry is real.
The central longer poem, ‘The Anniad’, was one of the best poems I’ve ever read but I didn’t latch on to much else in this collection.
The George Rashbrook year of poetry is real.
March 24, 2025
I can see why she won a Pulitzer for this. Masterpiece.
Read
February 21, 2024This is, apparently, the book that won her the Pulitzer. Why is it so hard to find? Ordered from ILL.
---
not in collections because it's poems. And not easy ones. A sort of novel-in-verse, but much more literary; so far I'm really having trouble understanding much of what's going on.
---
Done with the first read. I'm going to get a coupla books for adults about how to read poetry (so far I mostly have read children's and easier stuff like May Oliver), then read it again. Because I do see bits that I love.
"Not that woman! (Not that room!
Not that dusted demi-gloom!)
Nothing limpid, nothing meek.
But a gorgeous and gold shriek
With her tongue tucked in her cheek,
Hissing gauzes in her gaze,
Coiling oil upon her ways."
......... from *The Anniad*
"Think of almost thoroughly
Derelict and dim and done.
Stroking swallows from the sweat.
Fingering faint violet.
Hugging old and Sunday sun.
Kissing in her kitchenette
The minuets of memory."
......... ibid
" ... We want nights
Of vague adventure, lips lax wet and warm,
Bees in the stomach, sweat across the brow. Now."
........ ibid, Appendix
"People who have no children can be hard:
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:
Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense
Hesitate in the hurricane to guard."
......... from *the children of the poor*
---
Well, I read the How to Read Poetry books. And skimmed this again, reading more carefully any bit that caught my eye. I definitely see some stuff going on. Clearly brilliant and worth studying... with more help than what I have available. Highly recommended to those interested.
---
not in collections because it's poems. And not easy ones. A sort of novel-in-verse, but much more literary; so far I'm really having trouble understanding much of what's going on.
---
Done with the first read. I'm going to get a coupla books for adults about how to read poetry (so far I mostly have read children's and easier stuff like May Oliver), then read it again. Because I do see bits that I love.
"Not that woman! (Not that room!
Not that dusted demi-gloom!)
Nothing limpid, nothing meek.
But a gorgeous and gold shriek
With her tongue tucked in her cheek,
Hissing gauzes in her gaze,
Coiling oil upon her ways."
......... from *The Anniad*
"Think of almost thoroughly
Derelict and dim and done.
Stroking swallows from the sweat.
Fingering faint violet.
Hugging old and Sunday sun.
Kissing in her kitchenette
The minuets of memory."
......... ibid
" ... We want nights
Of vague adventure, lips lax wet and warm,
Bees in the stomach, sweat across the brow. Now."
........ ibid, Appendix
"People who have no children can be hard:
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:
Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense
Hesitate in the hurricane to guard."
......... from *the children of the poor*
---
Well, I read the How to Read Poetry books. And skimmed this again, reading more carefully any bit that caught my eye. I definitely see some stuff going on. Clearly brilliant and worth studying... with more help than what I have available. Highly recommended to those interested.
January 3, 2017
Line to line, this is beautiful. I'm not sure I understand the totality -- but I want to read more of her work and more about her life.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews