February 9th, 2012

I'm not going to lie, when first reading Brook's poems I really had a hard time deciphering what she was saying in her poems. But, as I continued to read, her messages became a little clearer.

Obviously her poems are radically different from the previous poems we have been reading. The past poems dealt with a lot of oppression against the black man by the whites, but Brook's poems also deal with oppression and with the challenges of being a woman in America. She deals with, what many would consider girly thing such as, love. Love seems to be a re-occurring theme throughout her poems. For example, in her poem "Ballad of Pearl May Lee," she talks about how the black man she was in a relationship with, raping a white women and how he eventually got lynched. She seems very bitter about him cheating on her and she seems satisfied that he did die. But at the same time she is able to show the readers the hate against blacks by describing how the man got lynched and the noises that he made. By doing so she is able to show the horrors of extreme racial prejudice and the struggles of being a black woman in America.

-Sean Song