Prairie Style

Prairie Style is about the breakdown of location and voice. It lays out a landscape of habitations (Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for ��ervantless 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 acknowledgement of the ��errible 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."

"[A] major figure in contemporary African American letters." -Henry Louis Gates

"Giscombe's concise poems -which are always essentially unpredictable -have an odd and vivid beauty. They move in intricately woven patterns (like the candid language of risky dreams), from the emotional depths of the most private places to places post-personal yet not quite public. And they make this journey with elegance, eloquence, wit, knife-sharp observations, and tenderness." -Clarence Major

"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