XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century

XX is award-winning poet Campbell McGrath’s astonishing sequence of one hundred poems-one per year-written in a vast range of forms, and in the voices of figures as varied as Picasso and Mao, Frida Kahlo and Elvis Presley. Based on years of historical research and cultural investigation, XX turns poetry into an archival inquiry and a choral documentary. Hollywood and Hiroshima, Modernism and propaganda, Bob Dylan and Walter Benjamin-its range of interest encompasses the entire century of art and culture, invention and struggle.

Both elegiac and celebratory, deeply tragic and wickedly funny, XX is a unique collection from this acknowledged master of historical poetry, and his most ambitious book yet.