Brown is a master humorist, balladeer, storyteller, sonneteer, folklorist, mythmaker, historian, dialectician, tragedian, satirist, sentimentalist, blues hound, caricaturist, and cartographer of cultural geography. His work is informed by great characters (in both senses of that term,) and it's his faith in the common man and woman, and not just in heroic figures like Nat Turner and John Henry and Ma Rainey, that comprises the heart of Brown's art. Indeed, it's his knack for fleshing out the extraordinary anecdote in the ordinary life, the brutally graceful phrase found in the most common vernacular, and the potential for artistic elegance inherent in folk forms that distinguishes Brown as a central American poet of this century….

[The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown] is remarkable not only for its content … but also for its very presence. Thematically, the collection reveals the length of Brown's reach as he spars with America, jabbing...