What unifies the essays in
Orpheus in the Bronx , writes author Reginald Shepherd,
is a resolute defense of poetry’s autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers.
Among the pieces in
Orpheus in the Bronx : an unflinchingly honest meditation on the author’s personal history and development as a writer and poet, a development that for many writers is often framed within the context of privilege - something Shepherd himself never had access to; an examination of the urban pastoral, which is an exploration, according to Shepherd, of
the splendor and misery of cities in which the cityscape is an active character, a presence that conditions and shapes the poems as much as it is appropriated and shaped by them ; and an essay on beauty and its meanings and forms.