I also admire Brooks' skill at gracefully evoking the nastiness of life: the 'thick fumes' smelling of 'gray' in Maud's tiny apartment, the 'soaked tissue' of cheap barbecue that her tacky husband brings home for Christmas night, and 'the scraps of baffled hate' she occasionally experiences.īrooks collapses distinctions between poetry and prose, ending many of the chapters with elliptical but potent musings. I reread Maud Martha when I'm craving its creature comforts - the 'polished apples in a water green bowl' - of Maud's childhood autumns and the 'little diamond-shaped cheeses that paprika had but breathed on,' which appear in her fantasies of New York. Perhaps even more enchanting than the book's heroine is its language.

It's easy to love the character of Maud, who is loyal, smart, and makes hot chocolate so rich that even her high-strung, critical mother must praise it. Maud even mind-melds with lesser beings, including a mouse she catches and then sets free in an exuberant act of generosity, and a chicken whose dignity she acknowledges even while pulling out its guts to prepare it for the oven. Maud also deeply imagines the plight of those close to her, such as her husband Paul, who would rather be married to a lighter-skinned woman. She understands the overweight girl at school who refuses to run in order to preserve her poise. Though Maud never travels far from home, her restless imagination ranges widely. But Maud Martha's riotous parade of human feeling will make you wonder what Brooks could have done with your life story. The plot here resembles your life or mine: good days and bad, no headlines.

Published in 1953, Maud Martha is the story of a girl who becomes a woman in 1940s black Chicago, told with minimal drama and maximal beauty.

Gwendolyn Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who died in 2000, published only one work of fiction for adults: the indispensable Maud Martha, a novella made up of 34 vignettes. All Things Considered talks with writers about their favorite buttonhole books.

All readers have them - and so do writers. in English and an MFA in creative writing and teaches at Washington and Lee University, she is still not sure whether to call Maud Martha a novel or a novella.Ĭall them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby. She received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for the stories in Get Down. Solomon's work has been featured in Vibe, Essence, and the anthology Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips and Other Parts. Her first book, a collection of stories entitled Get Down, set mostly in Philadelphia, will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on Oct. Asali Solomon was born and raised in West Philadelphia.

Maud martha