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1940年代，芝加哥南區雜草蔓生的院子和破敗酒館間，Maud懷抱著屬於她的夢想，關於紐約，關於浪漫愛情，關於她的未來：她著迷於蒲公英，學會喝咖啡，和某人墜入愛河，精心布置住處的小廚房，上俱樂部，宰殺雞隻，買很多帽子，生兒育女。
但她那淺膚色丈夫的夢想在別的地方：性感小貓俱樂部、其他女人，以及戰爭。
本書由多個生活片段組成，短小章節讓你我如同隨機路人與過客，目睹主角生活裡的某個或瑣碎或重大的片刻。銷售員口中吐出的那個詞、電影院的糟糕經驗、聖誕老人殘酷的一面…日常生活裡的惡意碎片，小小的、藏在看似無奇的每一日，尖利割人。
What, what, am I to do with all of this life?
Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the ‘scraps of baffled hate’ – a certain word from a saleswoman; that visit to the cinema; the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus– are always there …
Written in 1953 but never published in Britain, Maud Martha is a poetic collage of happenings that forms an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary life: one lived with wisdom, humour, protest, rage, dignity, and joy.
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 - 2000) was an American poet, educator, and civil rights activist based in Chicago. Her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was greeted with critical acclaim and a Guggenheim fellowship. Annie Allen (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, making her the first Black person to ever claim that honor. Her only novel, Maud Martha, was published in 1953. In The Mecca (1968) was nominated for the National Book Award, the same year she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000. Ms. Brooks was not only an active participant in the Black arts movement of the 60s and 70s she was also a role model. Never more so than when she left a major international House in the late 1960s to join Broadside Press, an up-and-coming Black publishing company. In 1976, she became the first Black woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and in 1985, the first to become Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry. She also published two volumes of autobiography, books for children, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Throughout her life, she taught young writers and held numerous academic posts - she was awarded over seventy honorary degrees - and became a professor of English at Chicago State University in 1990 until her death in 2000.
In 1939, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr. (author of "Windy Place"), whom she met after joining Chicago's NAACP Youth Council. They had two children: Nora Brooks Blakely, authorpreneur and president of Brooks Permissions in Chicago, and Henry Blakely III, a web designer & digital artist.
For more info about Gwendolyn Brooks visit us at Brooks Permissions — www.gwendolynbrooks.net
