Reviews

Haruko/Love Poems by June Jordan

indukisreading's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

katie_greenwinginmymouth's review

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

jadesarah's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

2.5

There's a specific type of poetry that I connect with, which is more direct poetry. Poetry closer to a story/essay, I guess. Or I'm just not intellectual enough. I feel like if someone who got this type of poetry went through it with me maybe I'd get it. But I felt like I wasn't taking the majority of it in. I was reading the words but wasn't getting it, wasn't feeling it. 

Some poems or sometimes, a line or two would stick with me and I FELT them. But unfortunately for the most part I didn't connect. Perhaps if I had heard them being performed it would have landed better with me. I'm sad I couldn't connect with this collection of poetry because I've seen people speak of their love of June Jordan. 

kendra_kendra's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.25

peachade's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective

3.25

laura_sackton's review against another edition

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Love & rage braided & tangled.
Rivery.
All the small love songs.

ceallaighsbooks's review

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

“But now I do
retrieve an afternoon of apricots
and water interspersed with cigarettes
and sand and rocks
we walked across:
          How easily you held
my hand
beside the low tide
of the world”

— from “Poem for Haruko”

TITLE—Haruko: Love Poems
AUTHOR—June Jordan
PUBLISHED—1993
PUBLISHER—High Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail

GENRE—poetry
SETTING—modern times & places; the sphere of Black + queer + revolutionary existence
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—queer love, sex, angst & desire, memory & longing, pacifism & protest, anti-war & land back movements, Indigenous rights & activism, disappointing lovers, healing, home & homeland, travel—interior & exterior, introspection & self-discovery/self-realization

“Good bye.
I take back my
body tractable and loaded up for bliss
I take back my
mind become inebriate and apostolic to         desire
I take back my
heart beating to the intimations of your lips
I take back my
spirit riveted in fire”

— from “Ichiban”

My thoughts:
What a stunning collection of poetry! The sensuousness! The angst! The passion! This is one of my favorite collections of love poetry that I’ve ever read. It felt almost like Sappho meets Audre Lorde meets Joy Harjo meets No’u Revilla—ah! So good.

But there was a lot more to this collection than just love poetry. Or rather, more than just romantic or sexual love—there was love for one’s self, love for one’s community, love for the people we stand with in solidarity across colonial borders, and love for strangers we can only hope will stand alongside us in turn. Love for animals, love for trees, love for every living thing all expressed with the beautiful awareness that we are in all living things and all living things are in us.

I also loved the style and flow of the poetry. Its rhythm and pacing—so lilting and fluid—felt so much like organic movement, like water—a torrent tumbling over stones here, a slow stream slipping through a mossy forest beneath a canopy of ferns there, inviting you to dive in, swim around, and luxuriate in Jordan’s luminous language.

I would recommend this book to readers who love sinuous poetry and sensual language. This book is best read outloud, often.

“And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.”

— from “I Must Become A Menace to My Enemies”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // war & imperialism, domestic violence (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: Late Spring / Early-Mid Summer

Further Reading—
  • ASK THE BRINDLED by No’u Revilla
  • Audre Lorde
  • Sappho
  • Joy Harjo
  • THE WORLD KEEPS ENDING, AND THE WORLD GOES ON by Franny Choi
  • Olive Senior
  • Zora Neale Hurston

Favorite Quotes—
12:01 a.m.
for Haruko
“Forget about fever
Forget about healthy or unhealthy
this or that
At times
the flesh below the thin skin
of your naked leg
seems to my pilgrim lips
a living column smooth but swollen
with the juice of my new
destiny”

“I am my soul adrift
the whole night sky denies me light
without you”

Why I became a pacifist
and then 
How I became a warrior again:
“and because failing to sing my song 

finally
finally

          got on my absolute last nerve

I pick up my sword
I lift up my shield
And I stay ready for war
Because now I live ready for a whole lot more

than that”

Resolution # 1,003
“I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover 
     in response to passionate and eager love

I will be nobody’s fool”

A Poem For
Haruko 10/29
“Oh! If you would only walk
into this room
again and touch me anywhere
I swear
I would not long for heaven or
for earth
more than I’d wish to stay there 
touched
and touching you”

Poem About Heartbreak That
Go On and On
“bad love last like a big
ugly lizard crawl around the house 
forever
never die
and never change itself

into a butterfly”

Phoenix Mystery #1
“The thing about fire
is every kind of moving
light
but the fever that enflames
the blood
ignites the air itself
between two stones
and lifts the world
into a crackling and molecular display
as complicated and seductive
as apocalypse
or else the baited/risen breath
surrendering to the deep
insistence
of uncommon
sexual bliss”

Letter to Haruko
From Decorah, Iowa, USA
“…and I am taken by these florid 
refutations of a frozen near horizon 
brilliant tokens of a flesh soft loom that held 
some woman’s sanity together 
ravelling intelligence 
like thread that magical 
became a cloth 
of loving color”

“But the roots 
for a connection that can keep 
Japan and San Francisco 
and Jamaica and Decorah 
Iowa and Norway 
all in one place palpable 
to any sweet belief 
move deep below 
apparent differences of turf

I trace them in the lifeline 
of an open palm 
a hand that works 
its homemade heat 
against the jealous 
hibernating blindness 
of the night”

Roman Poem Number Fourteen
“look the bridge be fallen down
look the ashes from the bones turn brown
look the mushroom hides the town 
look the general wears his drip dry red drip gown”

Poem for Joy
Dedicated to the Creek Tribe of North America
“And now the aboriginal
And now the daughter of the tomb.
And now an only child of the dead becomes the mother
of another life,
And how shall the living sing of that 
impossibility?
          She will.”

Romance in Irony
“And with the courage that the lonely or the 
          foolish keep
I set the clock
turn out the light
and do not dream and do not sleep”

After All Is Said and Done
“Maybe you thought I would forget  
about the sunrise  
how the moon stayed in the morning  
time a lower lip  
your partly open partly spoken  
mouth

Maybe you thought I would exaggerate  
the fire of the stars  
the fire of the wet wood burning by  
the waterside  
the fire of the fuck the sudden move  
you made me make 
to meet you
(fire)

BABY
I do not exaggerate and
if
I could
I would.”

On Your Love
“Beloved 
what I have dreamed 
if 
you ended the fevers and riot
the claw and the wail and the absolute 
furious 
dishevel of my unkempt mind 
you 
could never believe the quiet 
your arms 
make true around me. 

In your love I am sometimes redeemed 
a stranger 
to myself.”

Free Flight
“…and when forced 
into discourse amongst such adults as constitutes 
the regular treacheries of On The Job Behavior 
ON THE JOB BEHAVIOR 
is this poem on that list 
polish shoes file nails coordinate tops and bottoms 
lipstick control no 
screaming I’m bored because 
this is whoring away the hours of god’s creation 
pay attention to your eyes your hands the twilight 
sky in the institutional big windows 
no 
I did not presume I was not so bold as to put this 
poem on that list”

The Morning on the Mountains
“The morning on the mountains where the mist 
diffuses 
down into the depths of the leaves 
of the ash and oak trees 
trickling toward the complexion of the whole lake 
cold 
even though the overlooking sky 
so solemnly vermilion 
sub-divides/the 
seething stripes as soft 
as sweet as the opening 
of your mouth”

Poem for Nana
“What will we do 
when there is nobody left 
to kill?”

“the people of the sacred trees 
and rivers precious to the stars that told 
old stories to the night 

how do we follow after you?”

“Anna Mae Pictou Aquash 
slain on the Trail of Broken Treaties 
bullet lodged in her brain/hands 
and fingertips 
dismembered”

“as when I accept my sister dead 
when there should be (instead) 
a fluid holiness 
of spirit wrapped around the world 
redeemed by women 
whispering communion”

“Last year the South African Minister of Justice 
described Anti-Government Disturbances as 
Part of a Worldwide Trend toward the 
Breakdown of Established Political and Cultural 
Orders 

God knows I hope he’s right.

First fall moon of a new and final decade”

“and we pass the binoculars around 
like marijuana 
but the visuals seem 
better”

“This must be the longitudinal 
anatomy of rain 

this cosmic commotion twice 
bestirred by the exact 
infinitesimal 
assertions of your body’s 
dance 

These must be the subterranean 
beginnings of all light 

These shimmer surfaces 
that glow arterial below the frosted rooftops
and the thick

surrender of the open 
trusted 
trees
And like the stars  
above the dark far streets  
between us  
heat  
develops into liquid  
documents of fire 
and there 
and here 
moving through these beautiful waters 
you and I 
become the river”

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
“I 

I will no longer lightly walk behind 
a one of you who fear me: 
                     Be afraid. 
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits 
and facial tics 

I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore 
and this is dedicated in particular 
to those who hear my footsteps 
or the insubstantial ratding of my grocery 
cart 
then turn around 
see me 
and hurry on 
away from this impressive terror I must be: 
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon 
surrounded by my comrades singing 
terrible revenge in merciless 
accelerating 
rhythms”

“I must become the action of my fate.”

Evidently Looking at the Moon Requires a Clean Place To Stand
“The forest dwindling narrow and irregular 
to darken out the starlight on the ground 
where needle shadows 
signify the moon a harsh 
a horizontal blink that lays the land 
implicit to the movement of your body 
is 
the moon”

Roman Poem Number Five
“all kinds of dust covering the dead”

“KEEP MOVING KEEP MOVING 
the past is practically 
behind us”

“These poems 
they are things that I do 
in the dark 
reaching for you 
whoever you are 
and are you ready? 

These words 
they are stones in the water 
running away 

These skeletal lines 
They are desperate arms for my longing and love. 

I am a stranger 
learning to worship the strangers 
around me 

whoever you are 
whoever I may become”

jackelz's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced
“I knew whoever the hell ‘my people’ are I knew that one of them is you”

I liked a few lines, and a few poems, but overall I didn’t love this collection. The poems felt very scattered and didn’t make me emotional in the way I want poetry to make me feel. 

fourfootedbeasts's review

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

wuraoye's review

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inspiring

4.0