Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Poets on Poetry) - Tapa blanda

"Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift - the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings." - James Longenbach"

What unifies the essays in ""Orpheus in the Bronx"", writes author Reginald Shepherd, ""is a resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers."" Among the pieces in ""Orpheus in the Bronx"": an unflinchingly honest meditation on the author's personal history and development as a writer and poet, a development that for many writers is often framed within the context of privilege - something Shepherd himself never had access to; an examination of the urban pastoral, which is an exploration, according to Shepherd, of ""the splendor and misery of cities in which the cityscape is an active character, a presence that conditions and shapes the poems as much as it is appropriated and shaped by them""; and an essay on beauty and its meanings and forms.