"Celebates the life and work of poet ... Gwendolyn Brooks through a ... new poetic form, the golden shovel, created by Terrance Hayes. The last words of each line in a golden shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks's original. An array of [more than 300] writers, including [unknown and lesser-known authors as well as] Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates, have written poems for this ,,, anthology"--Page 2 of cover.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.