A biography in verse of one of the 20th century’s most versatile artists.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) and his decadeslong legacy in photography, film, and literature might seem too vast and sprawling a topic to convey within a traditional biography. So Parr, a nonfiction and children’s book author, instead threads hours of research and interviews with Parks and his family into poems that traverse all 94 years of his life, from his birth in Jim Crow Kansas to his success creating photo essays for Life magazine, directing films such as Shaft (1971), and developing his writing career. The poems cover such topics as Parks falling in love with his first and second wives; traveling to Brazil on assignment; meeting Malcolm X; and ultimately “blossoming from an old shadow / into the light of being a photographer.” Curiously, Parr makes Parks the speaker in these works, which gives them a sense of whimsy that undercuts the racism he faced as a Black man and the “deadly sadness” he experienced throughout his life. The author deftly conveys yearslong spans in relatively short poems and mindfully curbs abstraction to avoid opacity. Her sense of care in these 50-odd poems is palpable, as is the friendship she had with Parks. The strongest poems are those that lyrically interpret his experiences, such as “Yoo Hoo: Piano Concerto Calls Me”: “My lover—music—showed up for a long, overdue visit. / A musical line about flashing red capes and a gored matador / made its way into my restless fingers.” Others read more like biographical prose and thus have less emotional weight. The poems include slurs, such as the N-word, when chronicling moments in Parks’ segregated upbringing; some works make awkward references to Black skin: “If I hadn’t been Black, / he would have seen me turn red from embarrassment.”

An often transporting, if uneven, elegy for a man who eluded easy categorization.