Prairie Style

Author: C.S. Giscombe 

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (2008)

Prairie Style is about the breakdown of location and voice. It lays out a landscape of habitations (Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for “servantless 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 acknowledgment of the “terrible 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