I don't read autobiographies because they're usually self-serving. I wait until someone with distance does justice to a life.

Soldier, though, is the exception to my rule. June Jordan is able to look back over what seems a chaotic and sometimes cold, cruel childhood, and put it into the context of her life.

The style is many times lyrical and poetic. The words draw you in and keep you reading. The story works back and forth between what's actually happening to June, the child, and what she's thinking about as it unfolds. It's quite different from most autobiographies.

While I understand her father's quest to make sure his child is never a victim, his methods seem too brutal for words. It was a different time, and reality for an African-American is different, too, but reading about it is grueling.

I did have a problem with the fact that June's memories seem much too clear. I may be missing the point, but I don't know anyone who can remember her childhood with such clarity and from the age of six months. Perhaps this is literacy license. If so, fine. The problem, then, is mine.

No matter, this book is a fabulous read. I whipped through it in two hours.

June Jordan, African American Studies professor at UC Berkeley, has written a moving testament to her chaotic, challenging, and bittersweet childhood. This memoir written in a poetic manner is reminiscent of Sandra Cisneros' "House on Mango Street". The daughter of West Indian immigrants who revered education and hard work, she endured almost daily verbal assaults on her gender and physical abuse from her father. He was on one hand a supporter of Marcus Garvey and on the other hand felt the need to put down the American black at every turn. Her mother was a submissive, silent woman who realized that her daughter was her husband's son. Jordan's memories of the people who made an impact on her life and character, her Nanny, her Uncle Teddy, her camp friend, Jodi along with tales of childhood death-defying accidents, academic excellence, and first crushes are just bits and parts that serve to make this memoir a compelling read.

Sure to be a classic. A wonderfully charming and moving series of memories, observations, and poetic passages about a childhood at turns sweet, innocent, and difficult. Sometimes children make the most clear-eyed and wise observers, and it is the rare adult, such as June Jordan, who can recapture and communicate the experience of childhood in both its wonder and bewilderment. Although the elements of Jordan's childhood are specific - 19302/1940s, brusque, occaisionally-violent immigrant father, Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods, racial and social inequity - the themes are universal. Wonderful!

This is a book that every African-American woman should add to her book collection. I have referred to this book throughout my life. It has helped inform me about many issues that black women face everyday. This book has personally helped me, and others, in so many ways!

This book is great for Black women. It's not just a book on the health of the Black woman, but one which encourages each of us to take care of the most important person in our lives -- OURSELVES.

This book goes beyond the typical reminders about mammograms, pap smears, smoking, and HIV. Parts 4 through 6 really hit home. And the live voices of real women (Julia McMillon's story on page 567 really touched me!) made this book poignant. The photography and handy references at the end of each chapter makes this book worth every penny. As a result of reading this book, I joined the CA chapter of the Black Women's Health Project. My thanks go out to the author, Linda Villarosa! Keep up the good work.

This is a book that every African-American woman should add to her book collection. I have referred to this book throughout my life. It has helped inform me about many issues that black women face everyday. This book has personally helped me, and others, in so many ways!

Even if you don't teach poetry writing, you will love this book if you're a writer of politically conscious poetry or if you care about how good poetry gets written. With the popularity of Slam poetry these days, this is a very useful primer. It includes poems from different cultural backgrounds about a range of racial, social, and gender issues. It also provides lists of suggested readings that go beyond the narrow range of poetry books found in mainstream bookstores.

Lauren Muller, editor, gently persuades a talented crew from June Jordan's Poetry for the People classes at UC Berkely, to tell the rest of us how they do it--run poetry workshops and readings that literally transform their participants and audiences. The book provides college and communityteachers with an accessible plan for poetry workshops, including syllabii, bibliographies, thoughtful meditations on the teaching and writingof poetry, and a rich sampling of poems. It's a tribute not only to the power of the word but also to the solid principle that teaching, like popular theater, is one of the democratic art forms that can revolutionize the way we think and how we live in community.

This book, based on the experience of students and poets involved with June Jordan's popular UCal/Berkeley poetry courses, is a handbook for people who want to put poetry in the mouths and pens of "The People," everybody -- whether in the university or in a community setting such as a coffeehouse or church. The "white male" poetry of the "canon" is here put in its rightful place as but one of the several American poetry traditions, which also include African American, Caribbean, Native American, Asian American, Chicano/a, gay and lesbian, women's, and Irish American poetry, for which beginning bibliographies are supplied, as is a sample syllabus and an anthology of student poetry.

this is an amazing volume of poetry. It's tragic that it's out of print. this is June Jordan's poetry at it's best. it includes the amazing "poem about my rights" I want it so bad I'm tempted to tell the library I lost it, but I won't because everyone needs to read this.

June Jordan was many things: woman, Mother, friend, poet activist essayist. She excelled, apparantly, at each. She died earlier this year from breast cancer. She left us this final testament, a group of essays that touch on allof her abiding concersn: race, poetry,feminism, anit-semitism, The plight of the Palestinian refugees, breast cancer,militarism, rape[agonizingly, she had been rapes. Twice!},Martin Luther King, Jr. and his womanising...She touched on each of these subjects in essays, rails about the lack of spending in research in breast cancer, goes to a LA synagogue for Shabbat service after a psychotic gunmen had opened fire at a Jewish day care centre,speaks about her son and his childhood friend, Daniel Pearl, who had been brutally murdered in pakistan,wonders aloud about the racial implication of the 2000 election and the curiopus way it was handled in Fla., speaks on rape in blunt,terrifying fashion. June jordan was a superb writer, and a better human being. the world is emptier without her light and wisdom, though as succor we have her essays and poems, for which I, for one, am so damn grateful. Highly recommended

I really can't believe that so much of June Jordan's work is out of print! Especially considering the new popularity of poetry. This collection of her poems from the late fifties to mid seventies is so vibrant and alive with beauty and power. I just recently discovered June Jordan's work and I recognise the treasure. This is amazing stuff!

This book is blood, sweat and tears. It is the sweet succulence of love. Her poetry is bitter and rich.

This is simply a swell collections of poems. Some are sweet, others painful. All are provoking.

June Jordan's poetry beats furiously in the name of love: for Haruko, for life, for real. Since the human language is inadequate to truly express this emotion, Jordan manipulates and bends the written word to fit the human heart. When she describes love as "yes directed by desire" ("When I or Else"), she speaks the living truth.

Read "Free Flight", "Roman Poem Number Five" and "12:01 A.M." and let her words reverberate in your every mental crevice. Let your feelings stir as hers until you see with love's eyes. That is the definition of poetry.

June Jordan's collection of essays spans almost twenty years of her life, from her days as a young mother "learning to see" the world around her and beginning to make her own actions seen and voice heard, through her growing involvement in Civil Rights demonstrations, the beginnings of her teaching career, and later on in her life as a Black woman still fighting for justice using her weapon of choice: words.

This book explores Jordan's perspective on and experience with a variety of topics, including race riots, urban housing, educational language policy, children's rights, university Black Studies programs, African liberation, land reform, and the politics of publishing. Her combination of social political commentary and personal reflection is thought-provoking and accessible to a diverse audience of readers. Her writing is clear and passionate, and most pieces, previously published, are prefaced by background information that places them historically.

This is a book to be savored both for what it says and how it says it.

In Civil Wars, poet and activist June Jordan explores political issues through a very personal lens. This collection of essays, speeches, and letters, previously published but presented in this text with contextualizing annotations, masterfully blends public and private spheres. Jordan looks at critical issues such as race, homosexuality, linguistic differences, and violence by drawing on events in her own life and telling her intersecting story through vibrant prose. For instance, Jordan examines the power differential between "White" and "Black" English by discussing her novel His Own Where in relation to Shakespeare and questioning the linguistic hierarchy that values particular codes over other alternatives. Civil Wars is an engaging, moving text that will make you think deeply about social justice through a personal perspective. A must read!

June's poetry isn't bad. It's actually quite good... if you have the time to actually read the whole poems. There are some good short ones and I admire the fact she's very honest in her poems but her poetry gets LONG. She has many poems dedicated to "b.b.L." and those poems are about relationships which I enjoyed very much because you can relate to what she's feeling. She has one poem entitled: "Poem After Receiving Voicemail from You After (I Don't Even Know Anymore) How Long!" Who can't relate to that?

All I can say is amazing. June Jordan writes poems that truly speak to you. They are filled with love, outrage, humor. She has a down to earth writing style that anyone can understand. Says say what she wants to say honestly, without regret about topics like race, sexuality, war, brutality, and oppression. If you enjoy poetry this is a must read.

This collection of Jordan's work gives a fair cross section of her gorgeous love poems and prescient political work. This book considers the struggles all over the world for people to live freely without fear. I find that picking up my copy and reading it now, it's still as current and awakening as when i read it as a college student.