Download or read book Kissing God Goodbye written by June Jordan and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1997 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jordan's work, at this point and for many years now, is perfect. She says exactly what she means to say, and says it so powerfully that the reader hears each phrase. She manages to tap into that place where race and sexuality, class and justice, gender and memory come together. She doesn't go with the cutting-edge idea but reaches for that difficult terrain where others may fear to tread. --American Book Review. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet. --Alice Walker. Jordan is one of the most musically and lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. --Adrienne Rich.
Download or read book Kissing God Goodbye Poems 1991 1997 written by June Jordan and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1997-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book We re On A June Jordan Reader written by Christoph Keller and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book Behind the Lines written by Philip Metres and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2007-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether Thersites in Homer’s Iliad, Wilfred Owen in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” or Allen Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium “Poetry and the American Voice” in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful. Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet’s relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation. In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements.
Download or read book June Jordan written by Valerie Kinloch and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-06-30 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: June Jordan was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, to Mildred and Granville Jordan, Jamaican natives. During her life, she became one of the most prolific, important, and influential African American writers of her time. Before her death from breast cancer in 2002, Jordan published more than 27 books, including Some of Us Did Not Die, Solider: A Poet's Childhood, Poetry for the People: Finding a Voice through Verse, Haruko Love Poems, and Naming Our Destiny. Her work Civil Wars, a collection of letters and essays, addressed such topics as violence, homosexuality, race, and black feminism. Working in many genres and touching on many themes and issues, Jordan was a powerful force in American literature. This biography reveals the woman, the writer, the poet, the activist, the leader, and the educator in all her complexity. Working in many genres and touching on many themes and issues, June Jordan was a powerful force in American literature. This biography reveals the woman, the writer, the speaker, the poet, the activist, the leader, and the educator in all her complexity. June Jordan was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, to Mildred and Granville Jordan, Jamaican natives. During her life, she became one of the most prolific, important, and influential African American writers of her time. Before her death from breast cancer in 2002, Jordan published more than 27 books, including Some of Us Did Not Die, Solider: A Poet's Childhood, Poetry for the People: Finding a Voice through Verse, Haruko Love Poems, and Naming Our Destiny. Her work Civil Wars, a collection of letters and essays, addressed such topics as violence, homosexuality, race, and black feminism. Kinloch offers a life and letters of this prolific writer, delving into both her biography and her contributions as a writer and activist. This approach unveils the power of language in Jordan's poems, essays, speeches, books—and ultimately in her own life—as she challenged political systems of injustice, racism, and sexism. Kinloch examines questions surrounding the pain of writing, the anger of oppression, and the struggle of African American women to assert their voices. Attention is paid to the ways in which Jordan's life informed her writings her perspectives, and her contributions to the global landscape of class, race, and gender issues. The writer's major works are explored in detail, as Kinloch weaves discussions of her life into critical considerations of her writings. Ultimately, this portrait illustrates the ways in which Jordan's career represented her dedication to making words work; her ability to rally and revolutionize the spirit of people invested in decolonization, love, and freedom; and her responsiveness to the world in which she lived.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Poetry The Twentieth Century written by Eric L. Haralson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 2479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.
Download or read book Black Like Us written by Devon Carbado and published by Cleis Press Start. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction Anthology Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and writers whom readers may be surprised to learn were "in the life," Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration of the Depression era, from the postwar civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements, to the unabashedly complex sexual explorations of the present day, Black Like Us accomplishes a sweeping survey of 20th century literature.
Download or read book Haruko Love Poems written by June Jordan and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In trailblazing poet, essayist, teacher and activist June Jordan's poems, love is a vision of revolutionary solidarity, crossing borders both emotional and literal with an outstretched hand. Haruko traces the faltering arc of a passionate love affair with another woman while Love Poems encompasses relationships with men and women, political resistance, the need for self-care in a demanding, uncaring world and apocalyptic visions of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. A contemporary of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, June Jordan's spectacular poetry remains profoundly politically potent, lyrically inventive and breathtakingly romantic. First published in 1994, Haruko/ Love poems is a vitally important modern classic.
Download or read book Still Seeking an Attitude written by Valerie Kinloch and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From her activism to her passionate writings, June Jordan (1936 - 2002) is one of the most revered American poets of our time. Jordan's writing simultaneously provokes delight and energy while urging reflection on American society and its injustices. In Still Seeking an Attitude, the first reflection on her legacy, Jordan's life and works are explored in depth and detail, focusing on subjects ranging from her use of language and linguistics to her political activism and role in children's literature. These critical examinations elucidate the power and poetry of Jordan's words, serving as an exciting supplement for those already familiar with Jordan and an excellent guide for anyone discovering her works for the first time.
Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature written by Jay Parini and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 2273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.
Download or read book African American Literature written by Hans Ostrom and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature—such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era—and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects.
Download or read book Directed by Desire written by June Jordan and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-28 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affordable e-book of volume honored as one of Library Journal's "Poetry Books of the Year."
Download or read book Passion written by June Jordan and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades out of print, Passion—one of June Jordan’s most important collections—has returned to readers. Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including “Poem About My Rights,” “Poem About Police Violence,” “Free Flight,” and an essay by the poet, “For the Sake of the People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This new edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.
Download or read book The Sisterhood written by Courtney Thorsson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group—which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others—would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation. The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Drawing on original interviews with Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, and readings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group’s everyday collaboration and profound legacy. The Sisterhood advocated for Black women writers at trade publishers and magazines such as Random House, Ms., and Essence, and eventually in academic departments as well—often in the face of sexist, racist, and homophobic backlash. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and political ties that brought the group together as well as the reasons for its dissolution. She considers the popular and critical success of Sisterhood members in the 1980s, the uneasy absorption of Black feminism into the academy, and how younger writers built on the foundations the group laid. Highlighting the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, this book demonstrates that The Sisterhood offers an enduring model for Black feminist collaboration.
Download or read book The Sound of Listening written by Philip Metres and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’s practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera.
Download or read book Black Fire This Time Volume 2 written by Derrick Harriell and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2024-05-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this follow-up volume in the Black Fire—This Time series, over seventy-five poets and writers come together on the ongoing theme of "Black is Beautiful, Black is Powerful, Black is Home." Works ranging from poetry, fiction, essays, and drama cover a wide range of Black literature. This "continuum" of writing, as coined by Volume 1 editor Kim McMillon, brings together legends of the Black Arts era with contemporary writers in the tradition. This edition includes a hallmark work from the Black Arts era, We Own the Night by playwright and one of the last living legends Jimmy Garrett. Volume 2 of Black Fire—This Time will educate and inspire the next generation.
Download or read book African American Writers written by Philip Bader and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African-American authors have consistently explored the political dimensions of literature and its ability to affect social change. African-American literature has also provided an essential framework for shaping cultural identity and solidarity. From the early slave narratives to the folklore and dialect verse of the Harlem Renaissance to the modern novels of today
