The author's own selection of her poems suitable for young people and all dealing with being black.

Redolent of Chicago's ethnic culture, Susan Hahn's intensely personal lyrics emerge from the world of an extended Jewish family and its neighbors. The voices of these immigrants are imbued with the profound effects and memories of the journey "From a patrolled town in the Ukraine/to Baltimore on a boat, then a train to Chicago." Hahn's poetry is about love and the lack of love, about rejection, and about other forces—generational, political, social, and sexual—that overwhelm individuals and cause them to limit themselves both physically and psychologically.

Twenty-five years after Emily Dickinson died, Will Barnet was born. Both from New England, the poet and the artist found inspiration for much of their work in their region's geography, climate, and culture. Yet both rejected provincialism and forged their own paths--Dickinson (1830-1886) changed the face of poetry with inventive phrasing, punctuation, rhyme schemes, and subject matter and was viewed by many of her neighbors and contemporaries as an eccentric. Barnet (b. 1911)--who moved to New York City in the middle of the Depression--in each decade of his long career has maintained a vibrant intellectual and artistic life, bringing ever-expanding vision and heart to his work. He is one of America's most important contemporary artists. Barnet's respect and love for Dickinson's poetry sing from the drawings reproduced in this book. The World in a Frame presents forty-six poems by Emily Dickinson and twenty-four drawings by Will Barnet. An introduction by critic, essayist, and author Christopher Benfey offers a fascinating glimpse of Dickinson's life and personality while exploring the juxtaposition of her work with Barnet's art. Drawings by Will Barnet, poems by Emily Dickinson, and introduction by Christopher Benfey.

A collection of sonnets by the American Book Award-winning poet ponders the nature of belongings as possessions, as the reflections of a life, and as the places where life takes place in a volume that also features the writer's memories of a childhood home, her mourning for her mother, and more.