“BEST POETRY TITLES for 2005”
by the Editors of Library Journal

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan.

Copper Canyon. ISBN 1-55659-228-0. $40.

A multi-award-winning author of essays, plays, fiction, and children's books as well as poetry, Jordan died in 2002 of breast cancer....[this collection presents] the best of every book she published since launching her career in the sixties, and it ably reveals why Alice Walker says this witness to the African American experience "makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda."

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan gathers the work from Jordan's ten books of poetry and includes 70 never-before-published poems-a tender, fierce, and innovative series that she wrote before her death.

As Adrienne Rich writes in her "Foreword": "June Jordan . . . wrote from her experience in a woman's body and a dark skin, though never solely 'as' or 'for.' Sharply critical of nationalism, separatism, chauvinism of all kinds, as tendencies toward narrowness and isolation, she was too aware of democracy's failures to embrace false integrations. Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake's scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman's vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks' and Romare Bearden's portrayals of ordinary black people's lives; to James Baldwin's expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic."

In short, Directed by Desire is a breathtaking overview and the definitive June Jordan volume.