We're On: A June Jordan Reader

by Christoph Keller (Editor), Jan Heller Levi (Editor), Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Introduction)

Overview

"June Jordan was not the blacksmith's daughter. June Jordan was the blacksmith. . . . She never waited around, not for anyone's permission, to write or act or be. . . . For this book to have its birth now, in the lopsided moment when we need it most, is no chance occurrence. This great woman blacksmith is still sweetly hammering us on." —Nikky Finney

Poet, activist, and essayist June Jordan is a prolific, significant American writer who pushed the limits of political vision and moral witness, traversing a career of over forty years. With poetry, prose, letters, and more, this reader is a key resource for understanding the scope, complexity, and novelty of this pioneering Black American writer.

From "Poem about Police Violence":

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop
you think the accident rate would lower
subsequently?

. . .

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rabid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don't
you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and
scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a "justifiable accident" again
(again)

People been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938584350
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	09/19/2017
Pages:	500
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

June Jordan (1936 - 2002) was a poet, activist, journalist, essayist and teacher. Prolific and passionate, she was an influential voice who lived and wrote on the frontlines of American poetry, international political vision and human moral witness. The author of many award-winning books, she traveled widely to read her poems and to proclaim a vision of liberation for all people. Dynamic, rebellious, and courageous, June Jordan was, and still is, a lyrical catalyst for change.

Christoph Keller is the author of numerous prize-winning novels, plays and essays in German, including Gulp (1988); I’d Like My Country Flat (Ich hätte das Land gern flach, 1996); and the Swiss best-selling memoir The Best Dancer (Der Beste Tänzer, 2003). Keller and his wife, the American poet Jan Heller Levi, are currently co-writing Whatever Can Come To A Woman, the first full-length biography of the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Jan Heller Levi is the author of three books of poetry, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, Skyspeak, and Orphan. She is the editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader and consulting editor on the 2005 reissue of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. She is also coeditor, with Sara Miles, of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Levi lives in New York City with her husband, the Swiss-born novelist and playwright, Christoph Keller, with whom she is completing a biography of Rukeyser. She teaches at Hunter College.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/21/2017
Reviewed by Aja MonetIn defiant black ink marching across the white page, June Jordan (1936–2002) speaks from the eternal front lines of justice: “I am black alive and looking back at you.” Jordan was a lover and liberator. She stood against oppression in all its forms: literary and material, personal and political. Throughout her life, she was fully engaged in movement organizing and activism as a poet and essayist. She was also integral to expanding the analytic framework of intersectionality. Arguing that our work must be ruled by an open spiritual orientation and an intellectual humility, Jordan recognized the only politic that will guide us and free us is rooted in radical love: “The ultimate connections must be the need that we find between us.”This academic reader spans a lifetime of community witnessing, writing, and doing; it contains many of Jordan’s essays, poems, letters, comments, and interviews. She wrote on housing development, land reform, gender and state violence, identity politics, economic injustice, international solidarity, and poetics. She wrote odes and dedications to freedom fighters and revolutionaries, celebrating their courage and love. Her essays do not flatter, though they mirror us; they push us toward deep contemplation, an ardent call for risk and action.She critiques the limitations of our language—“By itself, our language cannot refuse to reflect the agonizing process of alienation”—to expand our linguistic imagination. She wrote to break free, to hold language accountable as a part of her decolonizing method, to attain a deep understanding of our connection and power. Jordan makes the case for poetry as a revolutionary act, “the creation of poems as a foundation for true community: a fearless democratic society.” She dispels the myth of poetry in solitude, encouraging writing in community.Jordan begs us to trust one another and to tell the truth, to read the world more closely, to learn the wisdom of those who came before, who resisted before, and loved before. She laid a foundation, leaving a revolutionary blueprint for poetry to transform our lives beyond the white gaze and its literary imagination. Writing of the 1980 Miami uprising, which was labeled a “race riot,” Jordan saw black people’s collective resistance to the murder of Arthur McDuffie as a demonstration of love: “Where there is conflict, conscious termination of self-hatred is the only means to rational possibilities for love. Miami was an act of love: love for Arthur McDuffie and love for every jeopardized Black life.”A collection of this kind is long overdue. June Jordan is an integral part of the canon for black lives and a guide to those who resist. Jordan does not merely “talk back to power,” she acquires it. She uses language to embolden her readers and to shift power to the people. This book is not just a collection of figurative words; it is a tool for liberation. (Sept.)Aja Monet is a poet and organizer in Miami and the author of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.

Publishers Weekly

Jordan begs us to trust one another and to tell the truth, to read the world more closely, to learn the wisdom of those who came before, who resisted before, and loved before. She laid a foundation, leaving a revolutionary blueprint for poetry to transform our lives beyond the white gaze and its literary imagination. . . .This book is not just a collection of figurative words; it is a tool for liberation.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review by Aja Monet “This first posthumous volume to hold both [Jordan’s] verse and her prose puts her back near the center of conversations where—with Audré Lorde and Adrienne Rich—she clearly belongs.” —Stephanie Burt, American Poets “Read this reader, maybe beginning with Jordan’s ‘Poem about My Rights’ or ‘Poem About Police Violence.’ If nothing else June Jordan will teach you how to love, no matter who you are. This book is the rainbow sign after all the flooding across America.” -E. Ethelbert Miller for the New York Journal of Books “The wonder of poetry is that after the body burns off, the breath and bones, the residue of mischief, the fierceness and loyalty to truth remains. Don’t you hear her beside us now, as we gaze into the dark? Doesn’t holding these pages light your mind with impossible bravery?” —Cornelius Eady

From the Publisher