Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A poetic history of the twentieth century from one of our most beloved, popular, and highly lauded poets a stirring, strikingly original, intensely imagined recreation of the most potent voices and searing moments that have shaped our collective experience.
XX is award-winning poet Campbell McGrath s astonishing sequence of one hundred poems one per year written in a vast range of forms, and in the voices of figures as varied as Picasso and Mao, Frida Kahlo and Elvis Presley. Based on years of historical research and cultural investigation, XX turns poetry into an archival inquiry and a choral documentary. Hollywood and Hiroshima, Modernism and propaganda, Bob Dylan and Walter Benjamin its range of interest encompasses the entire century of art and culture, invention and struggle.
Elegiac and celebratory, deeply tragic and wickedly funny, XX is a unique collection from this acknowledged master of historical poetry, and his most ambitious book yet.
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About the Author
Campbell McGrath's previous collections are Shannon, Seven Notebooks, Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, Florida Poems, and Pax Atomica. His awards include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.