We're On

"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