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jadesarah's review against another edition
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.
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.
laura_sackton's review against another edition
Love & rage braided & tangled.
Rivery.
All the small love songs.
Rivery.
All the small love songs.
ceallaighsbooks's review
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
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.