Orpheus in the Bronx

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.