A. Van Jordan Selected Works

In this volume of poems and lyric prose, A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidibé, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words.

In 1936, teenager MacNolia Cox became the first African American finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition. Supposedly prevented from winning, the precocious child who dreamed of becoming a doctor was changed irrevocably. Her story, told in a poignant nonlinear narrative, illustrates the power of a pivotal moment in a life.

This ambitious collection explores the intersection of the infinite world of physics with the perplexities of the human condition. Employing both narrative and cinematic structure, Jordan re-creates the lives of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and comic book superheroes—the Green Lantern, the Atom—and also reveals himself in poems of recollection and loss.

In this superb and eagerly anticipated debut collection by the young African American poet A. Van Jordan, the energy and music of Jordan's language, his honesty of feeling and of truth telling, are matched by his freshness and power. "His stuff shines, sweat pours off it," says Joy Harjo. And there is a kind of solidity and reality in Jordan's poems that display varieties of experience and depths of meditation too rarely found in contemporary American poetry.