Langston Hughes
2 books
- You follow a boy named Sandy through a Black Kansas town, and Hughes gives you everything: his grandmother Aunt Hager at her washtubs, his father Jimboy drifting in with a guitar. It moves slowly and hums with blues, tender about poverty without ever going soft on it.
- Hughes gets blues and jazz onto the page: The Weary Blues, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, lines that look simple and land hard. If poetry usually feels like homework, his voice reads like someone talking straight to you.