XX: Poems For The Twentieth Century

From one of our most beloved, widely read, and highly lauded poets, a stirring, intensely imagined recreation of the twentieth century's most potent voices and searing moments A poetic history of the twentieth century by the award-winning, popularly acclaimed poet Campbell McGrath, XX is an 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. An acknowledged master of historical poetry, McGrath gives us his most ambitious book yet. Both elegiac and celebratory, deeply tragic and wickedly funny, XX is truly a collection like no other.