Synopses & Reviews
Prairie Style is about the breakdown of location and voice. It lays out a landscape of habitations (Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for "servantless families," fox dens in an embankment, the two-mile long face of Chicago's Robert Taylor public housing project, etc.) and crosses and recrosses the line between poetry and prose. The book is an acknowledgment of the "terrible frankness" of color, pleasure's distance, and the similarity of equivocation and argument. Prairie Style is the turn inland. "Inland, one needs something more racial, say bigger, than mountains."
Review
"C. S. Giscombe makes evident a genius of attention to all the determinants of any one of us, our particulars, our people. He traces with consummate art the passage of time through his own accumulating presence, his points of origin and return." Robert Creeley
Synopsis
"[A] major figure in contemporary African American letters."-Henry Louis Gates
About the Author
C. S. Giscombe is the author of several books, including Prairie Style, Giscome Road and Here. He has also published a memoir entitled Into and Out of Dislocation. He is the editor of Mixed Blood, a poetry journal, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.