Brass Knuckles

The poems in this powerful first book have grown from the American urban experience of the last half of this century, a time of decay and diminishing possibilities; they vary from realistic vignettes of working-class Chicago neighborhoods to prose poems elegant and spare in their surrealism. At the middle of this book and at the thematic center of the collection is Dybek’s remarkable reworking of the myth of Persephone, in which the American goddess learns to prefer the underworld and has fal…