A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry

The co-editors of A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry here undertake to represent the disenfranchised: those from minority groups whose poetry, they believe, too often is deemed peripheral to a predominantly white, male and Eurocentric literary canon. Celebrated poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and J. D. McClatchy, appear alongside less familiar writers, and while many pieces share common themes--loss of love or faith, despair at isolation, pleasure in communion--what are consistently notable are originality of vision and the evident desire of each contributor to avoid structural or contextual formulae. Dennis Cooper movingly details the thoughts of a male prostitute: ``I daydream right through it / while money puts chills on / my arms, from this to that / grip. I was meant to be naked.'' Juan Felipe Herrera challenges the American dream: ``We are all assassins / coveting the warmth inside the jeweler's castle. / I came to America.'' Sorrowful, subversive, this is a compelling anthology. (July)