Directed by Desire : The Collected Poems of June Jordan

“ Directed by Desire . . . is a powerful addition to the entire canon of American poetry.”— Booklist Now in paperback, Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordan’s -poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan’s ten volumes, as well as dozens of “last poems” that were never published in Jordan’s lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with 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.” From “These Poems”: These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? The cloth edition of Directed by Desire was selected as a Library Journal Poetry Book of the Year and received the Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry. June Jordan taught at UC Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her twenty-eight 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. After her death in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor. 9781556592348-frontcover; 9781556592348-text; Jordan_DirectedByDesire_e-frontmatter; Jordan_DirectedbyDesire_e-backmatter; CCPDonorEbook100112; Title Page; Note to the Reader; Foreword; Editors' Note; These Poems; Who Look at Me; Who Look at Me; Some Changes; For My Mother; In the Times of My Heart; The New Pietà: For the Mothers and Children of Detroit; The Wedding; The Reception; Nowadays the Heroes; Not a Suicide Poem; This Man; Fibrous Ruin; Abandoned Baby; Uncle Bullboy; Maybe the Birds; In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.; If You Saw a Negro Lady; For Somebody to Start Singing. And Who Are You?All the World Moved; Juice of a Lemon on the Trail of Little Yellow; I Live in Subtraction; What Declaration; My Sadness Sits Around Me; Not Looking; When I or Else; Whereas; Or; Let Me Live with Marriage; Toward a Personal Semantics; Then It Was; San Juan; For Christopher; Leaves Blow Backward; Nobody Riding the Roads Today; Firing Burst His Head; In Love; What Would I Do White?; Okay "Negroes"; For Beautiful Mary Brown:Chicago Rent Strike Leader; Solidarity Day, 1968; LBJ: Rejoinder; Poem for My Family: Hazel Griffin andVictor Hernandez Cruz; Uhuru in the O.R. New like Nagasaki Nice like NiceneBus Window; No Train of Thought; Poem from the Empire State; 47,000 Windows; What Happens; Clock on Hancock Street; Exercise in Quits; A Poem for All the Children; Cameo No. 1; Cameo No. 2; I Celebrate the Sons of Malcolm; In My Own Quietly Explosive Here; Of Faith: Confessional; Poem to the Mass Communications Media; Last Poem for a Little While; New Days; Conditions for Leaving; May 1, 1970; On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the United Nations: 1970; Memo to Daniel Pretty Moynihan; Poems of Exile; Roman Poem Number One; Roman Poem Number Two. Roman Poem Number ThreeRoman Poem Number Four; Roman Poem Number Six; Roman Poem Number Seven; Roman Poem Number Eight; Roman Poem Number Nine; Roman Poem Number Ten; Roman Poem Number Eleven; Roman Poem Number Twelve; Roman Poem Number Thirteen; Roman Poem Number Fourteen; Roman Poem Number Fifteen; Roman Poem Number Sixteen: Sightseer; Roman Poem Number Seventeen; Roman Poem Number Five; Poems of Return; May 27, 1971: No Poem; Realizing That Revolution Will Not Take Place by Telephone; On the Spirit of Mildred Jordan. After Reading the Number One Intellectual American Best Seller, Future Shock, All about Change Is Where We're AtOn Holidays in the Best Tradition; For C.G., Because David Came in Hot and Cryingfrom the News; On Your Love; About Enrique's Drawing; About Merry Christmas/Don't Believe the Daily News; Poem about the Sweetwaters of the City; West Coast Episode; From an Uprooted Condition; Poem for Angela; On the Black Poet Reading His Poems in the Park; On the Black Family; For David: 1972; On Declining Values; It's about You: On the Beach; On the Paradox in Rhyme; About the Reunion.

This definitive collection includes Jordan's last poems and embodies her passions for justice, activism, and beauty.

Publishers Weekly

As fierce in her activist life as in her passionate verse, Jordan (1936-2002) first rose to fame in the early '70s with declamatory poems and series inspired by African-American vernacular: "Who look at me?" her first series demanded; "I am black alive and looking back at you." A flexible metrical sense, and an undercurrent of humor, set her best work apart from her performance-oriented peers early on; Jordan later expanded her range with travel (in a series of poems about life in Rome), with persona poems and satire ("Directions for Carrying Explosive Nuclear Waste Through Metropolitan New York"; "The Beirut Jokebook") During the '80s, Jordan (Naming Our Destiny) often focused on international struggles, praising revolutionaries and peace activists in Cuba, Angola, Nicaragua and Israel/Palestine, and excoriating American militarism and racism. She later became a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, assembling an influential book on the teaching of poetry (June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint) and a widely noticed memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2000). This ample collection concludes with 62 pages of "last poems": several concern the cancer that took Jordan's life, and one of the best sasses back at Eminem. Adrienne Rich's foreword praises this "most personal of political poets" for her verbal power and for her commitment to justice: her loyal following will certainly agree. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Affordable e-book of volume honored as one of Library Journal's "Poetry Books of the Year."| "Directed by Desire . . . is a powerful addition to the entire canon of American poetry."—Booklist Now in paperback, Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordan's -poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan's ten volumes, as well as dozens of "last poems" that were never published in Jordan's lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with 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." From "These Poems": These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? The cloth edition of Directed by Desire was selected as a Library Journal Poetry Book of the Year and received the Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry. June Jordan taught at UC Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her twenty-eight 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. After her death in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor. "The definitive overview of June Jordan's poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan's ten volumes, as well as dozens of "last poems" that were never published in her lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with 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." June Jordan taught at UC Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her twenty-eight 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." --Provided by publisher " Directed by Desire . . . is a powerful addition to the entire canon of American poetry."— Booklist Now in paperback, Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordan’s -poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan’s ten volumes, as well as dozens of "last poems" that were never published in Jordan’s lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with 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." From "These Poems": These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? The cloth edition of Directed by Desire was selected as a Library... "Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan gathers the work from Jordan's ten books of poetry and includes many never-before-published poems - including a tender, fierce, and innovative collection of poems written before her death, in 2002, from breast cancer."--Jacket