Sonata Mulattica

Rita Dove’s poetry is seductive. Her narrative verse reels you in because it’s like reading a page-turner of a novel that suddenly immerses you in her beautifully recreated world. It is always a world she has taken the time to carefully research. In 1986’s Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas and Beulah Dove’s subject was the adventurous and bittersweet epic lives of her grandparents, who survived and loved through the Great Depression and into the Jim Crow era in Akron, Ohio.