Thomas and Beulah

…Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Thomas and Beulah (1986), her tribute to her maternal grandparents, Yusef Komunyakaa won the same prize for Neon Vernacular (1993), a collage of new and collected poems from seven previous volumes, ranging from Dien Cai Dau (1988), based on Komunyakaa’s service in the Vietnam War,…

…whose sequence about her grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Graham’s increasingly abstract and elusive work culminated in The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), selected from five previous volumes. The AIDS crisis inspired My Alexandria (1993) by Mark Doty, The Man with Night Sweats…

…Dove published the Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah, a cycle of poems chronicling the lives of her maternal grandparents, who were born in the Deep South at the turn of the century. Stylistically, Dove set a challenge to avoid using the pronoun “I” while writing the book. Thematically, she has…