Jordan, June

June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint

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A Fitting Memorial to a Truly Great Woman
A good read
A tribute to the power of poetry and to democratic teaching
Puts "the people" back into poetry

June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint
June Jordan
Manufacturer: TF-ROUTL
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415911680

Book Description

June Jordan is one of America's best known poets. Her vision and politics have set her at the forefront of contemporary poetry and her work has a far-reaching impact on all poets and readers of poetry today. A dedicated and inspired teacher, her innovative and highly successful poetry program, Poetry for the People, has recently emerged as a national phenomenon.

This book is the result of a unique collaborative effort among members of Jordan's Poetry for the People workshop, and provides, for the first time, a step-by-step guide for teachers and poets on how to inspire young people to become practicing poets.

Specially featured are interviews with contemporary poets--Ntozake Shange, Leroy Quintana, Cornelius Eady, Alfred Arteaga, Janice Gould, Dan Bellm, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo--who reflect on their poetic influences and the ways they adapted the canon to their own identities. Also valuable are bibliographies on African American, Asian American, native American, Carribean, Chicano/a, Latino/a, American, Irish and gay and lesbian poetry, and poetry for and by children.

Focusing on both Jordan's classroom and workshop methods for teaching poetry and workshop basics, the Blueprint then extends its scope to moving poetry outward into our communities, covering, among other thinghs, stepping up to the mike and sponsoring "hot shot" poets.

June Jordan's Poetry for the People is testimony to the group spirit that makes her poetry workshops such powerful events. No poet or teacher of poetry should be without this indispensable guide to making poetry a meaningful part of every school and community.

Customer Reviews:

A Fitting Memorial to a Truly Great Woman.......2005-04-27

I stumbled on this book when I was looking for new resources for good poems to read for Black History Month. Flipping through it, I found it instantly engaging, so I had no problem buying it on the spot.

It went on the stack of 'next time you're looking for something interesting to read' and had to wait for me to finish a few books of poetry, as well as Ted Kooser's Poetry Home Repair Manual. I felt some sort of irrational loyalty to the new Poet Laureate. But Kooser is good; very good. He made me think through everything that I write -- carefully, critically -- and my spirit was quickly wilting. I needed an antidote; or, more precisely, a complement, a little yin to counterbalance the substantial yang of Kooser's superb book. June Jordan was the very thing.

Reading it is a joy. Thinking through how to teach people to write poetry that speaks to the truth of their world, their experience, and how to bring it to the public -- all the grub with the glory, so to speak -- with June Jordan and her students was pure pleasure. And I couldn't argue with the results -- which are generously sprinkled throughout the book, with an extra dollop at the end. Poetry, the craft and how to sell it.

I have to mention that one thing that initially attracted me to Poetry for the People was the memory that Jordan had recently died (in 2002, I believe). I'm in the habit of reading a book by an author when they die as a sort of memorial, an extended meditation on their contribution and general mutability, if you will. We lost a great one when we lost June Jordan; but she was responsible enough to leave a substantial legacy, so the net loss is negligible. It's ours because she wanted it to be.

A good read.......2001-10-11

Even if you don't teach poetry writing, you will love this book if you're a writer of politically conscious poetry or if you care about how good poetry gets written. With the popularity of Slam poetry these days, this is a very useful primer. It includes poems from different cultural backgrounds about a range of racial, social, and gender issues. It also provides lists of suggested readings that go beyond the narrow range of poetry books found in mainstream bookstores.

A tribute to the power of poetry and to democratic teaching.......1999-11-03

Lauren Muller, editor, gently persuades a talented crew from June Jordan's Poetry for the People classes at UC Berkely, to tell the rest of us how they do it--run poetry workshops and readings that literally transform their participants and audiences. The book provides college and communityteachers with an accessible plan for poetry workshops, including syllabii, bibliographies, thoughtful meditations on the teaching and writingof poetry, and a rich sampling of poems. It's a tribute not only to the power of the word but also to the solid principle that teaching, like popular theater, is one of the democratic art forms that can revolutionize the way we think and how we live in community.

Puts "the people" back into poetry.......1999-08-06

This book, based on the experience of students and poets involved with June Jordan's popular UCal/Berkeley poetry courses, is a handbook for people who want to put poetry in the mouths and pens of "The People," everybody -- whether in the university or in a community setting such as a coffeehouse or church. The "white male" poetry of the "canon" is here put in its rightful place as but one of the several American poetry traditions, which also include African American, Caribbean, Native American, Asian American, Chicano/a, gay and lesbian, women's, and Irish American poetry, for which beginning bibliographies are supplied, as is a sample syllabus and an anthology of student poetry.

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This is a woman I'd like to know.
A childhood testimony of courage and perserverance
Charming and Powerful
Excellent, simply excellent.
a story that does justice to a difficult childhood

Soldier: A Poet's Childhood
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0465036813
Release Date: 2000-05-02

Amazon.com

"There was a war on against colored people," June Jordan recalls her father telling her. "I had to become a soldier." Jordan's fierce, funny, lyrical memoir of her first 12 years reveals the seeds of her adult poetry in her childhood experiences: the magical sounds of words in the nursery rhymes her mother crooned, the awareness nearly from birth of the bitter complexities of family relations. Jordan's father (depicted in a brilliantly nuanced portrait) was a proud Jamaican immigrant who encouraged his daughter to read and took her to museums and to Carnegie Hall, but also called her "damn black devil child" and beat her for the slightest misstep. He moved his family from a Harlem housing project to their own home in Brooklyn, enrolled June at a white boarding school, and fought savagely with his wife, who argued, "The child is a Black girl ... you gwine to make her afraid to be sheself!" Jordan reproduces the rhythms of West Indian speech as vividly as she captures African American culture of the 1930s and '40s in a poignant autobiography that, for all its racial particularity, tells an all-American story of the charged emotional legacy bequeathed by parents striving to give their children a better life. --Wendy Smith

Book Description

A profoundly moving childhood memoir by a noted poet, essayist, teacher, and journalist

A not uncommon story is here captured with astonishing beauty-the childhood of a gifted daughter whose immigrant parents must struggle in order to provide her with the educational and social opportunities not available to them or, for that matter, to most blacks of her generation.

In vivid prose that re-creates the heady impressions of youth, June Jordan takes us to the Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods where she lived and out into the larger landscape of her burgeoning imagination. Exploring the nature of memory, writing, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.

Customer Reviews:

This is a woman I'd like to know........2002-10-14

I don't read autobiographies because they're usually self-serving. I wait until someone with distance does justice to a life.

Soldier, though, is the exception to my rule. June Jordan is able to look back over what seems a chaotic and sometimes cold, cruel childhood, and put it into the context of her life.

The style is many times lyrical and poetic. The words draw you in and keep you reading. The story works back and forth between what's actually happening to June, the child, and what she's thinking about as it unfolds. It's quite different from most autobiographies.

While I understand her father's quest to make sure his child is never a victim, his methods seem too brutal for words. It was a different time, and reality for an African-American is different, too, but reading about it is grueling.

I did have a problem with the fact that June's memories seem much too clear. I may be missing the point, but I don't know anyone who can remember her childhood with such clarity and from the age of six months. Perhaps this is literacy license. If so, fine. The problem, then, is mine.

No matter, this book is a fabulous read. I whipped through it in two hours.

A childhood testimony of courage and perserverance.......2000-09-12

June Jordan, African American Studies professor at UC Berkeley, has written a moving testament to her chaotic, challenging, and bittersweet childhood. This memoir written in a poetic manner is reminiscent of Sandra Cisneros' "House on Mango Street". The daughter of West Indian immigrants who revered education and hard work, she endured almost daily verbal assaults on her gender and physical abuse from her father. He was on one hand a supporter of Marcus Garvey and on the other hand felt the need to put down the American black at every turn. Her mother was a submissive, silent woman who realized that her daughter was her husband's son. Jordan's memories of the people who made an impact on her life and character, her Nanny, her Uncle Teddy, her camp friend, Jodi along with tales of childhood death-defying accidents, academic excellence, and first crushes are just bits and parts that serve to make this memoir a compelling read.

Charming and Powerful.......2000-07-21

Sure to be a classic. A wonderfully charming and moving series of memories, observations, and poetic passages about a childhood at turns sweet, innocent, and difficult. Sometimes children make the most clear-eyed and wise observers, and it is the rare adult, such as June Jordan, who can recapture and communicate the experience of childhood in both its wonder and bewilderment. Although the elements of Jordan's childhood are specific - 19302/1940s, brusque, occaisionally-violent immigrant father, Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods, racial and social inequity - the themes are universal. Wonderful!

Excellent, simply excellent........2000-05-23

Over the past 40 years civil rights has come a long way and progress has been made in areas that makes life easier. But imagine if you had to struggle with poor education, terrible living conditions, and even segregation. Now imagine trying to get ahead in a world and society that was making all this an impossible task.

June Jordan takes you on a twelve year journey through the eyes of one person who life was given these circumstances and somehow managed to succeed and become one of the most successful people, her own. June Jordan tells a story through words and poems that has you stopping and thinking throughout the entire 260 pages.

The book is one of the first I have read that makes a clear representation of how a child caught up in turmoil can block out what they see and find something good in the life they have been given. Jordan's ability to capture the reader makes this book one of the most impressive I have read so far this year.

After reading this book and seeing how the tough and often overbearing father along with the serine and religious mother were at odds, I gained a deeper understating of how difficult it must have been for any African American to try to make and succeed in the white man's world.

Jordan has written several other books and has won a number of prestigious awards over the years. I found this book enjoyable and easy to read. Take time out and follow through the 12 years with a child who I found dealt with the same things I did as a child, only Jordan had them magnified. An excellent book!

a story that does justice to a difficult childhood.......2000-05-11

June Jordan is not a victim. She shows us that difficult childhoods aren't as straightfoward as that. Her violent father may have taught her to solve problems with violence, but he also taught her to be observant. The best part of this book is that we hear the words and see places that influenced Jordan's writing style: her father, her Uncle Teddy, New York of the 30's and 40's.

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

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More than words....
A loss to the world
A luminous voice that is missed...

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays
June, Jordan , and June Jordan
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0465036937

Book Description

"She remains a thinker and activist who 'insists upon complexity.' " Reamy Jansen, San Francisco Chronicle* Some of Us Did Not Die brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

Customer Reviews:

More than words...........2005-06-26

This is an excellent piece of literary art. June Jordan, quite frankly, "makes love to the English language." This is how I describe the writing in this book. It is rare that I feel connected to any author in the way that I feel emotionally and spiritually connected to Ms. Jordan, through her writing. It is the first work of hers that I picked up. At the time, I was unaware that she had passed away from breast cancer. She will be missed but I am confident that her words and legacy will never be forgotten.

A loss to the world.......2004-12-05

A poet, an activist, a writer and a teacher, June Jordan died in 2002.

It is somewhat depressing to read these essays, some of them years old, and realize how little events have improved or changed. Her essay on Palestine's children is one such example. The title of her book refers to the attacks on September 11th, and she ranges over subjects such as poverty, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, rape and far too many of the horrors of the world. Articulate and passionate, Jordan brings a keen creative mind to her subjects and strangely enough, considering her subjects, a feeling of optimism.

Reading Jordan does give one some hope for the future and the fervent wish for more of her ilk. An original, creative mind, she is sorely missed.

A luminous voice that is missed..........2002-10-20

June Jordan was many things: woman, Mother, friend, poet activist essayist. She excelled, apparantly, at each. She died earlier this year from breast cancer. She left us this final testament, a group of essays that touch on allof her abiding concersn: race, poetry,feminism, anit-semitism, The plight of the Palestinian refugees, breast cancer,militarism, rape[agonizingly, she had been rapes. Twice!},Martin Luther King, Jr. and his womanising...She touched on each of these subjects in essays, rails about the lack of spending in research in breast cancer, goes to a LA synagogue for Shabbat service after a psychotic gunmen had opened fire at a Jewish day care centre,speaks about her son and his childhood friend, Daniel Pearl, who had been brutally murdered in pakistan,wonders aloud about the racial implication of the 2000 election and the curiopus way it was handled in Fla., speaks on rape in blunt,terrifying fashion. June jordan was a superb writer, and a better human being. the world is emptier without her light and wisdom, though as succor we have her essays and poems, for which I, for one, am so damn grateful. Highly recommended

Average customer rating:

risky poet
A great modern poet
Interesting but nothing new

Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0385490321
Release Date: 1997-10-13

Book Description

With the same pithy but eloquent observations characteristic of Jordan's classic poetry collections, Things that I Do in the Dark and Living Room, and her notable essay collections, Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, Kissing God Goodbye will strike a universal chord as it witnesses the pain, confusion, and passion of what it's like to live in our society at the twilight of the twentieth century.

June Jordan's many selves, as poet, essayist, feminist, and activist come together here in a collection of poetry that is alternately lyrical, magical, shockingly spare, pungently political, yet universally resonate. Beautiful love poems are interspersed with poems about Bosnia, Africa, urban America, Clarence Thomas, affirmative action, her mother's suicide, and Jordan's bout with breast cancer.

This collection of poetry will be warmly welcomed by June Jordan loyalists and new readers who will thrill to discover a voice that has been described as one of the "most gifted poets of the late twentieth century."

Customer Reviews:

risky poet.......2003-10-25

i don't know many poets who are as risky as june jordan in their poetics. what a singular voice in american letters. she has such a command of craft--especially with vertical rhythm. the cadence of her poetry is such that you are compelled to listen/ read her lyrical truth from word to precious word. she doesn't come to pretty conclusions, and is down right blunt. in "bosnia, bosnia" she states: too bad there is no oil between her legs that 14 year old Muslim girl. or her own internal and external debate with "god": he has no dominion over me/ my name is freedom/ my name is female. and even through all this, she manages such empathy, such tenderness. she does not obliterate anyone--not even god. she KISSES god goodbye. a loving gesture, even to one in whom she does not agree with. i can think of so few poets who write of current affairs and current conflicts with such rich detail--with such urgency. in my humble opinion, a must read.

A great modern poet.......2000-04-15

All I can say is amazing. June Jordan writes poems that truly speak to you. They are filled with love, outrage, humor. She has a down to earth writing style that anyone can understand. Says say what she wants to say honestly, without regret about topics like race, sexuality, war, brutality, and oppression. If you enjoy poetry this is a must read.

Interesting but nothing new.......1999-03-03

June's poetry isn't bad. It's actually quite good... if you have the time to actually read the whole poems. There are some good short ones and I admire the fact she's very honest in her poems but her poetry gets LONG. She has many poems dedicated to "b.b.L." and those poems are about relationships which I enjoyed very much because you can relate to what she's feeling. She has one poem entitled: "Poem After Receiving Voicemail from You After (I Don't Even Know Anymore) How Long!" Who can't relate to that?

Haruko/Love Poems: Love Poems (High Risk Books)

Average customer rating:

broth for the modern soul
The Heartbeat of a Lover's Soul
This book is damn good.

Haruko/Love Poems: Love Poems (High Risk Books)
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Serpent's Tail
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Love Poems | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997
June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint
Nature: Poems Old and New
The Blue Estuaries: Poems: 1923-1968

ASIN: 1852423234

Book Description

For Haruko

Little moves on sight blinded by histories as trivial or expansive as the rain seducing light into a blurred excitement

Then she opens all of one eye as accurate as longing as two hands beholden to the hunger of green leaves

and rinsing them back into regular breath she who sees she frees each of these beggarly events cleansing them of dust and other death

Poem about Process And Progress For Haruko

Hey Baby you betta hurry it up! Because since you went totally off I seen a full moon I seen a half moon I seen a quarter moon I seen no moon whatsoever!

I seen a equinox I seen a solstice I seen Mars and Venus on a line I seen a mess a fickle stars and lately I seen this new kind a luva on an' off the telephone who like to talk to me all the time

real nice

Resolution # 1,003

I will love who loves me I will love as much as I am loved I will hate who hates me I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me I will stay indifferent to indifference I will live hostile to hostility I will make myself a passionate and eager lover In response to passionate and eager love

I will be nobody's fool

Foreword

WHAT IS THIS thing called love, in the poems of June Jordan, artist, teacher, social critic, visionary of human solidarity? First of all, it's a motive; the power Che Guevara was trying to invoke in his much-quoted assertion: "At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love." I think also of Paul Nizan: "You think you are innocent if you say, 'I love this woman and I want to act in accordance with my love,' but you are beginning the revolution. . . . You will be driven back: to claim the right to a human act is to attack the forces responsible for all the misery in the world." Neither of them, admittedly, was claiming the love of a woman for women, the love of a man for men, as revolutionary, as a human act.

But the motive is "directed by desire" in Jordan

Customer Reviews:

broth for the modern soul.......2001-03-23

This is simply a swell collections of poems. Some are sweet, others painful. All are provoking.

The Heartbeat of a Lover's Soul.......2000-03-04

June Jordan's poetry beats furiously in the name of love: for Haruko, for life, for real. Since the human language is inadequate to truly express this emotion, Jordan manipulates and bends the written word to fit the human heart. When she describes love as "yes directed by desire" ("When I or Else"), she speaks the living truth.

Read "Free Flight", "Roman Poem Number Five" and "12:01 A.M." and let her words reverberate in your every mental crevice. Let your feelings stir as hers until you see with love's eyes. That is the definition of poetry.

This book is damn good........1999-10-12

This book is blood, sweat and tears. It is the sweet succulence of love. Her poetry is bitter and rich.

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Fannie Lou Hamer. (Crowell Biography)
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Ty Crowell Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry (Harlem Moon Classics)

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soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry (Harlem Moon Classics)
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Harlem Moon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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The Rose That Grew From Concrete

ASIN: 0767918460
Release Date: 2004-11-02

Book Description

Black poets from the early twentieth century and onward come together for a moving anthology, edited and organized by the late, revered poet June Jordan.

First published in 1970, soulscript is a poignant, panoramic collection of poetry from some of the most eloquent voices in the art. Selected for their literary excellence and by the dictates of Jordan’s heart, these works tell the story of both collective and personal experiences, in Jordan’s words, “in tears, in rage, in hope, in sonnet, in blank/free verse, in overwhelming rhetorical scream.”
Soulscript features works by Jordan and other luminaries like Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Gayl Jines, James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Claude McKay, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, and Richard Wright, as well as the fresh voices of a turbulent era’s younger writers. Celebrated spoken-word poet Staceyann Chin, an original cast member of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, has also added an introduction that speaks to Jordan’s legacy, helping to further cement soulscript as a visionary compilation that has already become a modern classic.

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
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Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Copper Canyon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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General | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Jordan, June | African American | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint

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Affirmative Acts

ASIN: 1556592280

Book Description

"Jordan . . . is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."-Alice Walker

"Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan's work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress."-BOMB

Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan's 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs.

As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power-of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value. . . . She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality."

From These Poems

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

June Jordan taught at the University of California Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her 28 books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children's books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. Her numerous awards include a PEN West Freedom to Write Award and a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers Conference. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.

Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems
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Powerful unflinching poetry

Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Thunder's Mouth Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Jordan, June | African American | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Jordan, June | ( J ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Customer Reviews:

Powerful unflinching poetry.......2001-10-15

This collection of Jordan's work gives a fair cross section of her gorgeous love poems and prescient political work. This book considers the struggles all over the world for people to live freely without fear. I find that picking up my copy and reading it now, it's still as current and awakening as when i read it as a college student.

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Affirmative Acts
June Jordan
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Ethnic & National | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Civil Rights & Liberties | Current Events | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Civil Wars
Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
Soldier: A Poet's Childhood
Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems
Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997

ASIN: 0385492251
Release Date: 1998-10-20

Amazon.com

Activist, poet, essayist, and professor June Jordan collects some of her most provocative essays from the 1990s in Affirmative Acts, a book that, like Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, showcases her ability to appeal to a wide range of readers, covering topics like politics, race relations, the intersections between activism and passion, women's health care, and affirmative-action debates.

Jordan articulates complex and uncompromising points of view without alienating her readers in a swirl of jargon and tired political rhetoric. In the title essay, she writes: "I'm saying that calculated racialization of poverty, inequality, immigration, and education colors these realities so that too many of us perceive these issues as strictly equivalent to this or that race/this or that language/this or that ethnic heritage when, actually, the issue is how we ... devise a democratic, and peaceable, means to go on, or not!" Before she explains her proposed solutions, Jordan follows this sentiment with a simple observation: "It would seem we'd better get busy."

With essays like "We Are All Refugees," "My Mess and Ours," and "Notes on a Model of Resistance," Affirmative Acts places a human voice behind the cold facts of injustice, combining prose and poetry in an irreverent, conversational tone. Jordan espouses an earnest perspective informed by the spirit of collectivism, activism, social consciousness, respect, and hope. --Amy Wan

Book Description

Piercingly intuitive, eloquent, and caustic, Affirmative Acts is an address to the social, economic, racial, and political conflicts that mar the otherwise beautiful human experience.

In this new collection of political essays, Jordan explores the confusion of an America in the grip of pseudo-multiculturalism and political intolerance. Continuing in the tradition of her classic collections Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, Jordan acquaints readers with moments of American life threatened by social negligence and economic despair. With her characteristic insight, Jordan unveils how these too-frequent bouts of civil unrest bring out the weakest parts of the American spirit and challenges readers to remain inspired as society approaches the millennium.
June Jordan's wisdom shines through in this brilliant collection of inspirational essays, which will be eagerly awaited by Jordan loyalists and enjoyed by her new readers.

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