SOME OF US DID NOT DIE: SELECTED ESSAYS OF JUNE JORDAN

by June Jordan

"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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Poetry, Feminism, Race, Politics, LGBT

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet and activist.

Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. Jordan also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998 as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994.

She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great essay collection by a writer ahead of her time. Appreciated June Jordan’s courage in sharing both her forward political thinking (e.g., her pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist beliefs, her ideals for Black women’s liberation while also critiquing representation politics) and her personal experiences related to matters such as breast cancer and sexual assault. While some of her takes may not come across as new to those who read a lot of Black feminist texts, there’s a conviction, full-spiritedness, and progressive politic in Jordan’s writing that is still admirable and enjoyable.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freedom, that abstract idea that could be an item for debate at almost every dinner table, is a theme that makes me reach for a book and delve into its content any day; this idea of freedom that is the overarching theme of one of my favorite narrative nonfiction reads, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, and now this collection of essays from June Jordan.

How can we examine freedom, or even pretend to possess it wholly, when we don't protect the freedom to one's body, sexuality, thoughts and intellect, and more? How is it that the central idea of human rights, the one that we all possess initially, rights that are God-given, is always placed to the side? The minute one starts to have faith in humanity and this belief in basic human decency, it is all marred by things like black men getting shot by law enforcement each month, or women being talked about like fresh meat and second class citizens, but most importantly, one becomes disillusioned by the people who argue that all of this is okay, the ones who condone it by their vote, who say that there must be a simple explanation for it all, and oh, they say, what's the big deal?

American delusions of individuality now disfigure our national landscape with multitudes of disconnected pained human beings who pull down the shades on prolonged and needless agony. But if we could speak the unspeakable, if we would name and say the source of our sorrow and scars, we would find a tender and a powerful company of others struggling as we do, and we would know we should show to the world, at last, that shame belongs with blame, not on the victim.

It's likely that not too many readers will embrace June Jordan's political rhetoric; however, I admire her James Baldwinian stance for human rights, her refusal to be quiet. This is a well-pieced collection whose essays capture so many facets of freedom, or the lack thereof, and attack the kind of failure that upholds social injustice. It is one of those collections I had to read slowly and savor, one that grew on me and became one with the air around me.

June Jordan was a professor of African American Studies at U.C.Berkeley, a poet, memoirist and essayist. She was black and bisexual. She was a rape victim. Throughout parts of her life, she struggled with breast cancer. As I read, I couldn't stop thinking about how her stalwart words reminded me of Alice Walker's, and then in one of her essays she confirmed that Walker was her good friend. Her words ring true for today and although she's not alive, her words certainly are vividly real. Read if you cringe at the thought of how nonexistent your freedom could possibly become.

If you choose, you can consider this desperation a minority problem in America today, and then try to forget about it. But I believe this invisibility and this silence of the real and various peoples of our country is a political situation of language that every one of us must move against, because our lives depend on it.

[Raul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This incredible, incredible book. Decades worth of activism, humanitarianism, criticism all written with such stirring force. June Jordan's encompassing love for truth and justice was a necessary encounter.

"Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few."

Over the past two weeks, I've read this book, taking my time with it. Devouring, understanding, letting the words sit and turning them over and I was simply amazed by the scope her work covers. Whether urging bravery in the face of brutality or writing against the erasure of Black women activists and writers and poets or when condemning racism, islamophobia, sexism, child abuse and neglect, homophobia or biphobia, her words still as essential now as they were then.

[Zanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title essay, an address given in response to the events in New York City on the 9th September 2001, shows what we can expect; deep thought, deep feeling, and gorgeous poetry:

What about moonlight
What about watching for the moon above
the tops of trees and standing
still enough to hear the raucous crickets
chittering invisible beneath to soon lit stones

What about moonlight
What about moonlight
What about watching for the moon
through windows
low enough to let the screams
and curses of the street the gunshots
and the drunken driver screeching tires
and the boombox big beat and the tinkle
bell ice cream truck
inside

What about moonlight
What about moonlight...

- from Poem To Take Back The Night

This is a tough subject I guess, and maybe not the best introduction politically as it's presumably difficult for USians to deal with the subject without declaring some sort of allegiance to the state. This sharpened my edges to notice that nowhere in these essays, which are full of solidarity for all Black women first, and Black men, all Jewish people (she mentions many Jewish women friends and allies), Third world people, Latin@s and White women, native Americans seem to have been missed, most notably in the otherwise wonderful essay “Waking Up In The Middle Of Some American Dreams”. I found an essay 'June Jordan's Manifest New Destiny' which analyses her radical, critical, anti-racist position towards the state, foreign policy and 'hostile borders'. This is very interesting and makes points about nation and migration, especially in relation to the Black dispora and slavery that I value, but it also does not seem to find a decolonising lens, and is apparently uncritically titled. Maybe I missed something though. Here and elsewhere, June Jordan writes with disgust, empathy and rage about US wars and invasions and conflicts such as the occupation in Palestine.

Putting this reservation aside (oops) I felt blessed to read June Jordan's passionate and compassionate perspectives on so many subjects. In the brief but powerful 'Islam and the USA Today' she presents Muslims around the world as people victimised and ignored by the US state and its citizens. In 'I am Seeking an Attitude' she asks questions about race and gender, wondering why she has always proudly declared her blackness but not her woman-ness. She drums up rage about sexism everywhere in all manifestations

“...even in the realm of medicine and medical research, we, women, in general, do not exist: Most tests are conducted on men for diseases affecting primarily men. Men are regarded as the universal body, the universal voice. From cholesterol to literature, you just have to hope that your female organs and/or your female perspectives do not differ importantly from those organs and viewpoints of the universal male”

The anger is especially pointed surely towards medical sexism, which probably shortened June Jordan's life, prematurely ended by breast cancer. This incisive quote reminds me though, that transgender people are also left out of account in these essays, which I am inclined to notice because of June Jordan's bisexual perspective.

The essay I mentioned earlier, 'Waking up in the Middle of Some American Dreams', really struck a chord with me, it woke me up too. Living alone and far from friends and family, on a kind of solitary retreat, June Jordan realises (partly because someone intrudes on her solitude and rapes her) that the ideology od 'mass individuality' justifying this practice of hermitry is faulty, infantile, destructive, leads to victim-blaming and shaming, hampers solidarity and community spirit, prohibits collective action. It is isolating, alienating, and serves existing, unjust concentrations of power in the hands of the wealthy, the white, the male.

Another piece that I really loved is 'Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan'. Here, June Jordan proudly extols the attributes of Black (African-American) English as she discovered them with her literature students. Black English, she asserts, centres presence, it renders the “irresponsible language of the passive voice” (decried elsewhere in an earlier essay on a similar topic 'Problems of Language In a Democratic State') impossible, it demands accountability. Yet it is demeaned and mocked by mainstream culture. In the essay June Jordan shares how her class addressed the murder by police of the brother of one of the students. They choose to write to the media in Black English, knowing that by doing so they condemn their letter to being ignored.

A similar outrage is evidenced in her essay about Phillis Wheatley 'The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America'. As a teenage slave, Phyllis Wheatley wrote poetry similar in style and content to the white, mainly English literature she was given by the people who bought her. This poetry was published and acclaimed. After Suzanne Wheatley, the slaveholder who had become a kind of mother-figure to Phillis died, Phillis' biography becomes obscure, but she met and married a Black man John Peters, a legal scholar who 'thought well of his people', argued for Black liberation and 'earned the dislike of whites' June reports that Phillis continued to write, but that none of these later poems was ever published.

This would have been the poetry of someone who had chosen herself, free, and brave to be free in a land of slavery[...]

We will write, published or not, however we may, like Phillis Wheatly, of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our african lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods “we neither sought nor knew”, as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.

But not otherwise. And yet we persist.

The book seems to be arranged in reverse chronology, so the essays get older, and they get longer, less punchy, looser and more meandering. But their poetry and feeling diminish in no direction. The politics that animate the 1998 essay about the resegregating effects of removing affirmative action policies 'Break the Law!' which opens with a startling anecdote about a visit to a newly desegregated hotel, where because she, a Black woman, was now free to swim in the pool, White people refused to do the same, and which concludes “When the law is wrong... it is our moral obligation to break the law” goes right back to the earliest essays. She writes “freedom is indivisible”: I cannot be free while others are in chains. On holiday in the Bahamas, she is troubled by a photograph of a black waiter runing his shoes to bring drinks into the sea, she is troubled by the colonial history, the history of white people that erases the native and the slave, she is troubled by the woman who cleans her room. She never fails to particularise oppression and resistance. She is committed to touching and speaking to the realities of ordinary people, to write and distil feeling and lived experience and empathy. In love power and grace, she shares her passion and wisdom.

[Mareike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have known of June Jordan for a while, but this is the first time I’ve really spent time with her writing and I’m glad I did. I didn’t always agree with her, but it was fascinating to read her essays, both from a cultural history perspective and because her observations on such varied topics as race, gender, class, sexuality, and the intersections of all of these, as well as activism, teaching, urban planning, and other were so rich and sharp.

I will need to read (more of) her poetry next.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have fallen madly and passionately in love with June Jordan.

June Jordan doesn’t merely write words, she coaxes them into a dance that takes you in and twirls you in a kaleidoscope of beauty, rage, joy, and despair. She writes essays like a poet and you can’t help but devour them whole. As such, this is one of the finest collections of political essays I have ever read.

Some of Us Did NOT Die collects material that Jordan wrote between 1974-2002, covering an amazing span of US political and cultural history including (but not limited to): the Civil Rights Movement and the false dichotomy between MLK Jr. and Malcolm X, US involvement in Nicaragua, the OJ Simpson trial, links between anti-Semitism, Y2K, and anti-black racism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, Anita Hill, freedom for Palestine, sexual politics of the early 90’s, gay rights as civil rights, black feminism, and 9/11.

You can read the rest of my review at bisexual-books.tumblr.com.

[emi k · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book gives me chills.
it's like, when you wake up in the morning after you've been asleep under your warm blankets and you take a step outside your bed, beyond the comfort of your cozy little world, and realize that the world is a cold place, and you start to shiver. the realization of what it means to be alive, in this world, is often chilling. this is what this book does to me; it gives me chills because it awakens me...

And then you know why one of the freedom fighters in the sixties, a young Black woman interviewed shortly after she was beaten up for riding near the front of an interstate bus--you know why she said, "We are all so very happy."
It's because it's on. All of us and me by myslef: we're on.

[Dr. Breeze Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Kristen Suagee-beauduy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The following are excerpts from my book club's fb timeline.

"as my lawyer explained . . . the courts would surely award me a reasonable amount of the father's income as child support, but the courts would also insist that they could not enforce their own decree. In other words, according to the law, what a father owes to his child is not serious compared to what a man owes to the bank for a car, or a vacation. Hence, as they say, it is extremely regrettable but nonetheless true that the courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a child is not a car or a couch or a boat. (I would suppose this is the very best available definition of the difference between and American child and a car.)" (234). ...because our society has decided that capitalism is more important than humanity.

In Jordan's essay "A Couple of Words on Behalf of Sex (Itself)," she writes a couple of paragraphs about the (troubling) direction feminism/women's studies/critical studies is headed. These paragraphs seemed like a great non-fiction connection to the values regarding monogamy and sexuality in 1984. The text I'm referencing is this: "And then there's monogamy run wild: Everybody from teenagers to gay men espouses (I think that's the verb) monogamy as a realistic whatchamacallit./ And, meanwhile, a beautiful woman or a beautiful man in any visual documentation is, thereby, degraded, and acknowledgment of this or that movies star as physically exciting strongly suggests corrupt, anticommunity values./ At the least, this should make dating more difficult./ I suppose many people will give it up, entirely, and, instead, join the nearest political movement promising redirection of all sexual impulse into exhausting design and distribution of strictly cerebral flyers, citywide" (61).

I wish Jordan cited this source! I want to research the validity of this analysis because it would be an incredible new way for me to think about language! Jordan writes that, "one afternoon, a guest speaker came to my class at U.C. Berkeley, to describe distinguishing attributes of the Chinese language . . . . Roughly, summarizing what he said:/ There is no gender, and no pronouns, and no past or future tense/no inflections of verbs, and no plural case, and no prepositions, and no definite or indefinite articles, and this is the language. The carrier of consciousness, of the majority population of the world!" (Jordan 20).

I love that the results of writing poetry in Chinese allowed Jordan's class to analyze the linguistic significance of such syntactical and grammatical freedom!: "fluid interrelationships, equality in value among all elements (words), humility, the poet as a part of all that is, collective cultural allusion, precision in multiplicity of meanings versus either/or formation, or surmise, and eminently musical composition" (21).

I love that the results of writing poetry in Chinese allowed Jordan's class to analyze the linguistic significance of such syntactical and grammatical freedom!: "fluid interrelationships, equality in value among all elements (words), humility, the poet as a part of all that is, collective cultural allusion, precision in multiplicity of meanings versus either/or formation, or surmise, and eminently musical composition" (21).

Jeez, we read Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school--but I don't remember learning that the author, Zora Neale Hurston, "died penniless, and was buried in an unmarked grave" (Jordan 286). Dangit

Jordan p 251: "All of the traceable descendants of Whitman have met with an establishment, academic reception disgracefully identical; except for the New World poets who live and write beyond the boundaries of the USA, the offspring of this one white father encounter everlasting marketplace disparagement as crude or optional or simplistic or, as Whitman himself wrote 'hankering, gross, mystical, nude.'" mmmm. yeah. hankering. gross. mystical. nude. crude. simplistic.

June Jordan, quoting Bertolt Brecht: "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." This pisses me off--maybe because I'm ashamed that I'm currently taking a break from all the hard stuff, all the community work that is fighting to make the world a better, safer place. But maybe, when we've been struggling, we make the choice to be judged as "weak" because taking a break from the cut-throat speed of our existence is self-care. I guess the trick is knowing when you've taken enough care of yourself and need to push yourself back out into the world with your dukes up. I guess the anger at the quote Jordan used comes from a place where victims of violence and injustice blame themselves for weakness in impossible situations, I guess the anger also comes from a place where those perpetrators are forgiven and allowed to remain full members of the community and our lives without any repercussions, I guess I'm pissed because I keep meeting women who have had to rise above, way above, and know that they're stronger than the perpetrators of violence and injustice but will never be acknowledged or celebrated by anyone other than those who know how to keep secrets and rage in-check.

it's taking me a while to finish too, for many of the same reasons. it's a good exercise in recognizing the various privileges i have, feeling guilty, and then redirecting that awkward shame into something useful and "strong."

June Jordan, page 133: "Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine."

June Jordan, page 133: "Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine."

Excerpt, June Jordan, p. 15:
"see
him circle closer
closing closer
for the kill
until
he makes that dive
to savage
me
and inches
from that blood flood lusty
beak
I roll away
I speak
I laugh out loud
Not yet
big bird of prey
not yet"

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no idea why June Jordan is not more widely anthologized as an essayist, particularly in regard to her insights about gender, race, and class. This collection was an amazing way to immerse myself in her evolving thought/perspectives as a Black American feminist throughout the decades, beginning in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and continuing up until 9/11.

From her introductory essay:
“to live is not just a given: To live means you owe something big to those whose lives are taken away from them. And two things happened for me: I realized that regardless of the tragedy, regardless of the grief, regardless of the monstrous challenge, Some of Us Have Not Died” (12-13).

The collection is organized in reverse chronology, and I didn't find myself hooked until the second and third sections. Her newer essays seemed too mired in current events that are no longer current (much how I felt about Roxanne Gay's essays in her collection Bad Feminist that I knew would be outdated in a few short years).

But her earlier essays, from the 70's to the 90's, are absolutely brilliant. She was way ahead of her time in how clearly and confidently she wrote about intersectionality, neo-colonialism, collective resistance, black masculinity, feminism, and police brutality.

I had expected to find more essays about writing, in particular, but I quickly realized that for Jordan, the Word is truly made flesh in her everyday existence, self-love and protest against injustice. To write about writing is to write about life, race, gender, family, education, and literature -- it is not to write about pen and paper.

Some of my favorite essays were as follows:
“Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams” about our nation's focus on individuality and isolation instead of collectivity, particularly in regard to how we deal with shame

“Requiem for the Champ” about racism, poverty, masculinity, and violence regarding Mike Tyson's conviction for sexual assault

“Nobody Mean More to Me Than You” about Black English and police brutality -- probably my favorite in the entire collection

“The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America” about the sheer miracle of Phillis Wheatley as “the first Black human being to be published in America...the second female to be published in America” (176).

"Report from the Bahamas" about neo-colonialism and finding connection between a privileged middle-class American (Jordan) and a Black maid named Olive in the Bahamas and the problematic nature of solidarity

"Many Rivers to Cross" heartbreaking account of her mother's suicide and the power of women who sustain us

“Where is the Love?” from which I copied down just about every line. In this piece, Jordan discusses Black feminism and defines it from within the construct of radical self-love: “I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. It means that I must everlastingly seek to cleanse myself of the hatred and the contempt that surrounds and permeates my identity, as a woman and as a Black human being, in this particular world of ours. It means that the achievement of self-love and self-respect will require inordinate, hourly vigilance, and that I am entering my soul into a struggle that will most certainly transform the experience of all the peoples of the earth, as no other movement can, in fact, hope to claim."

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you're a woman, and you have ever, at all, struggled with what that exactly means or entails, you should read this book. Jordan is insightful and moving and honest, honest, honest. many brave essays on race, gender, class, civic duty...i read it while i was pregnant with my second daughter and it made me want to be a better mother to my girls--to help them be strong, invested, honest women.

[Rachel Lee]

Be Still My Heart. Make my blood jump up into volcanic, erupting, firework explosions. That's a good thing.

[Corybosworth]

You must be brave.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat outdated in terms of gender ('his or hers', etc.) though it felt more like a product of its time judging by my memories of the 90s and by how sensitive she was when it came to other political or social issues, including LGBT ones, that were relevant when she wrote these essays. When it came to issues like police brutality, being an activist, etc. it still felt like it could impart strength.

I also appreciated her essay on her mother's suicide. Having a parent who commits (or attempts) suicide is not something widely talked about so it felt important to read her essay on this particular pain.

[Lily P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Kindle)

It took me a while to get through this collection of essays. Serious topics are handled with unapologetic complexity requiring one to think on what June Jordan's telling you before moving into the next essay.

Still processing the essays in my mind. This is a book that will stay with you.

RECOMMEND

[Ophelia Kemigisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m so grateful that June Jordan wrote the things she did. Each essay is poetic, candid and taught me something new.

[Anjana Rao · Rating 5 out of 5]

June Jordan is shockingly timely. Brave, bold, eloquent essays that have given me heart during this time.

[Angélique (Angel) · Rating 4 out of 5]

2023 Edit

After this second readthrough, I'd still highly recommend this collection for provoking the kind of thought that I truly believe can lead to liberation. Reading these essays in 2023 made Jordan's words feel even more necessary than they did to me in 2016 and I've newly committed to reading her previous collections over the next several years, so I have access to the essays not included here. All that being said, one of the areas of weakness I noticed more this readthrough than the first one is the lack of a robust conceptualization of ableism, which impacts some of her language choices and mindsets throughout. With that caveat added, everything from my previous review stands.

----
2016 Original Review

As the painful reality of the injustice and ignorance rampant in the world fought to drown my spirit over the past couple of weeks, this collection of essays kept me afloat. Jordan's mix of intellectualism, vivid storytelling, and down-to-earth realness created a mental and emotional place of recharge and growth that allowed me not only to expand my way of considering the world but also to find solace and hope during a time of sorrow and uncertainty. Her dedication to explicating both personal and political truth and all the ways the personal and political connect regardless of how unfavorably others would receive those truths were especially encouraging for me as someone who shares several identity categories with Jordan (Black, bisexual, female, writer). This collection was an absolute gift to my life, and I highly recommend it to everyone. Even if you don't agree with some of the ideas and perspectives Jordan put forth, her essays will make you think more deeply about what you do believe.

[Les · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book when it was initially released, the first work of hers published after she'd passed. That was nearly a decade and a half ago and in reading these essays and commentaries now, with splashes of her poetry and that of others, made me feel like I had to live a bit more to even be prepared to absorb it. When I did and will again, essay by essay over the course of this year and many more to come. She asks questions that I ask and some 14 years or so later, I'm glad she's not here to see how paltry the answers have turned out to be. In a word - "me" and in a better word - "brilliant". She kept waiting for humanity to rise to her expectation but what she did while waiting was pretty damn great. And it was not enough, something she acknowledged. Which, sadly, put her leagues ahead of most. She is missed.

[Siyamthanda Skota · Rating 5 out of 5]

- And maybe the unity of restistance to hatred that will stop that hatred seems improbable. Maybe an orthodox Jewish congregation will never stand in protective vigil outside gay and lesbian community center, or the clinic of an abortion provider.
- Maybe a Black student organisation will never rally for Asian American rights.
- And maybe gay and lesbian activists will not bodily interpose themselves between synagogue and a "Phineas priest".
- Maybe nonse of us will ever recognise that all of us are wrongfully, equally, condemned: The Spawn of the Devil.
- Maybe. But, meanwhile, I am moving on an irrepressible with that all of us will: All of us will build that circle of our common safety that all of us deserve.
- I'm saying, "Are you hunting for Jews? You're looking for me!"

[Faith Reidenbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

When the going gets tough, bring in a poet to address the crowd and try to make sense of things. That's how the title essay came about--Jordan addressed the academic community at Barnard, her alma mater, a few days after 9/11. I found it rather unsatisfying, and likewise with some of the other essays based on lectures. But many are extraordinary, from her accounts of the academic (exploring with students what "Black English" is) and the personal (the often-indifferent treatment she received for the breast cancer that eventually killed her) and of course the political. This is a book I will buy and come back to.

[Lotara · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book has traveled with me and has become what some might my call my personal bible...it made me think, a lot, the good kind of thinking that helps to make sense out of things, life, the world, politics, humanity and the lack thereof. her writings are so vulnerable and feeling, leaving you with and intimate portrait of this amazing woman that you keep coming back to

[Gianna Mosser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how I made it this far without reading June Jordan. She blew me away. Her honest, satirical outrage channeled into poetry, protest, self-determined writing. Her pieces about OJ, about Mike Tyson, about Dr. Spock, about bisexuality and recovering the sexual, they all seemed to me to be just as resonant as when she wrote them.

[Sarah Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, I am really inspired by the work of June Jordan, but this book really didn't do it for me. I had a hard time with her writing style in this one, but am excited about the work she did. I feel more drawn to her poems than her short-essays.

[Jomo Lumumba]

That the life of any artist is worthy of being saluted at any time because they give voice to the things that sometimes those of us of the non-artistic world would love to say but either don't have the courage or stamina to say.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, I did not really know who June Jordan was before this book. The book was on the last chance clearance shelf at a bookstore and I picked it up.

I liked more than a few of her essays, but she does have a tendency to run self-righteous at times.

[Meer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb collection of essays. I don't know how I happen to have this in my library, but I was looking to clear my shelves for donations and this popped up. This is a keeper. I think I have a few more books by June Jordan that have now moved up on my priority list of must reads.

[Tana · Rating 4 out of 5]

June Jordan uses the essay to discuss a variety of issues that are housed within various categories -- international, American, black, and female. This reads like a series of protest essays, but Jordan allows room for her readers' voice, and she forms a place for us to converse.

[Black Bibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first June Jordan book, regrettably. However, as much as I liked this book, so much of it felt hit of miss for me. I liked some stories, some were so personal it was viscerally striking. I enjoyed those. Overall still a great read. Looking forward to reading more from her.

[anique · Rating 5 out of 5]

june jordan's righteous indignation for all things un-just is told through masterful, beautiful prose. economy of words, not beauty or meaning is what june jordan is all about.