The Yellow House on the Corner

When Carnegie Mellon University Press first published The Yellow House on the Corner in 1980, then twenty-seven year old Rita Dove immediately attracted attention as a major new voice in American poetry. Three years later she confirmed her extraordinary talent with her second collection, Museum, and in 1987 her third book, Thomas and Beulah, earned her the highest distinction in American letters, the Pulitzer Prize. Among other honors, she was also Robert Penn Warren’s choice for a Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1986, received a 1987 General Electric Foundation Award and spent 1988/89 as a Senior Mellon Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

Table of Contents:

• This Life
• The Bird Frau
• Robert Schumann, Or: Musical Genius Begins with Affliction
• Happenstance
• Small Town
• The Snow King
• Sightseeing
• Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, In a Dream
• "Teach Us to Number Our Days"
• Nigger Song: An Odyssey Five Elephants
• Geometry
• Champagne
• Night Watch
• The Secret Garden
• A Suite for Augustus
• 1963
• D.C.
• Planning the Perfect Evening
• Augustus Observes the Sunset
• Wake
• Back
• Belinda’s Petition
• The House Slave
• David Walker (1785-1830)
• The Abduction
• The Transport of Slaves From Maryland to Mississippi
• Pamela
• Someone’s Blood
• Cholera
• The Slave’s Critique of Practical Reason
• Kentucky, 1833 Adolescence—I
• Adolescence—II
• Adolescence—III
• The Boast
• The Kadava Kumbis Devise a Way to Marry for Love
• Spy
• First Kiss
• Then Came Flowers
• Pearls
• Nexus Notes from a Tunisian Journals
• The Sahara Bus Trip
• For Kazuko
• Beauty and the Beast
• His Shirt
• Great Uncle Beefheart
• The Son
• Corduroy Road
• O