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Library Journal

As a radical black feminist lesbian, Jordan offers a unique perspective on the world, and fans will rejoice in this fine new collection of her poetry and essays from 1986 to 1992. Her commentary is well written and thoughtfully presented. Jordan's essay on Mike Tyson's guilty verdict combined with an earlier essay on her own experience of being raped is as powerful as anything this reviewer has ever read. Some essays, such as the one on her father or the one on Dr. Spock and parenting, have universal appeal and power, and even readers who disagree with her ideas would do well to sample Jordan's book for the excellent quality of her writing. Recommended for all libraries.-- Anita L. Cole, Miami-Dade P.L. System, Fla.

Roland Wulbert

Jordan to some degree analyzes but more often decries racism in America since the deceptively invigorating civil and voting rights victories of the Eisenhower and Johnson administrations. Save in such passages as a lyrical insider's evocation of the high cultural values and resourcefulness characteristic of ghetto families that outsiders call "breeding grounds of despair," Jordan fustigates the racism that still thrives among Americans who abhor white citizens councils and Rodney King beatings. The prose style of her polemics is often simultaneously a model of concision and a model of the rhetoric favored by politicians of the old school. She is sometimes contradictory (maintaining both that the ghetto family is not disorganized and that the disorganization of the ghetto family is caused by institutionalized racism) and sometimes repetitive, but she documents the obduracy of American racism as eloquently as has any contemporary resource.