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Here are poems of suffusing light and profound anger: poems moved as much by political animus as by a deep love for the observation of human life in all its foibles, eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses.  With a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, The Essential June Jordan allows new readers to discover - and old fans to rediscover - the vital work of this endlessly surprising poet who, in the words of Adrienne Rich, believed that 'genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality.'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738804035857,"sku":"NGR9780241508718","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50702419132689,"sku":"GOR011525421","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52331378737425,"sku":"NLS9780241508718","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53405909090577,"sku":"GOR014909102","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0241508711.jpg?v=1751389682"},{"product_id":"once-i-gazed-at-you-in-wonder-book-jan-heller-levi-9780807123652","title":"Once I Gazed at You in Wonder","description":"Alice Fulton, the judge for the 1998 Walt Whitman Award, calls Once I Gazed at You in Wonder \"\"quite simply, the most endearing book I've read in some time.\"\" Readers of this audacious and, yes, endearing collection will agree. Jan Heller Levi has said that her poems are not confessions but conversations. Here, then, are her conversations with the world. What sets Levi apart, however, is that she lets the world answer back. Difficult fathers, ineffectual mothers are forgiven; ex-lovers are blessed. Sophisticated but never jaded, this poet looks in wonder beyond the self: a cup of coffee in one of New York's ubiquitous Greek diners can launch Levi into a meditation on truth versus compassion; a suite of elegies for her mother takes us from a hospital corridor to the studio of a television talk show where God is the guest; a poetry reading in which she shares the stage with a folk singer illustrates Levi's gift for illuminating the absurd textures of late-twentieth-century existence.    Don't you have any happy poems?  he wondered.  Don't you have any cancer songs?  I asked.  With the narrative drive of great fiction, the consolations of philosophy, and the rigor of art, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder marks the entrance of a much-needed new voice and vision in the conversation that is American poetry.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49909450801425,"sku":"CIN080712365XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50445945012497,"sku":"NGR9780807123652","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007800541457,"sku":"NIN9780807123652","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51822453293329,"sku":"CIN080712365XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52539835941137,"sku":"NLS9780807123652","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/080712365X.jpg?v=1762596610"},{"product_id":"skyspeak-book-jan-heller-levi-9780807131039","title":"Skyspeak","description":"In her much-anticipated second collection, Jan Heller Levi offers ardent, astonishing, individual poems in a trajectory that seems to suggest a story of one woman's life. But it's the realm of almost, the places of in-between - where rage and resignation, death and rebirth, the sayable and the unsayable, cannot be untwined - that Levi explores in the simultaneously harrowing and haunting Skyspeak. Here again are the delicious humor and the disarming directness - coupled with what Alice Fulton has called Levi's \"wicked ear\" - that graced her award-winning Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. Here again are poems \"so alive,\" as the author writes, \"it's killing me.\"","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49950015291665,"sku":"CIN0807131032VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51422051336465,"sku":"CIN0807131032G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807131032.jpg?v=1750946860"},{"product_id":"once-i-gazed-at-you-in-wonder-book-jan-heller-levi-9780807123645","title":"Once I Gazed at You in Wonder","description":"This collection of poetry gives voices to difficult fathers, ineffectual mothers, and ex-lovers. The author seeks to illuminate the absurd textures of late 20th-century existence.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49994401480977,"sku":"CIN0807123641G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51915625333009,"sku":"CIN0807123641VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807123641.jpg?v=1751330145"},{"product_id":"muriel-rukeyser-reader-book-jan-heller-levi-9780393035667","title":"A Muriel Rukeyser Reader","description":"Presents a selection of poetry and prose which span the 45 years of Muriel Rukeyser's writing life. Bringing together works only sparsely anthologized or long out of print, this book offers an understanding of the range, depth and originality of this writer.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50094693777681,"sku":"CIN0393035662G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50931060998417,"sku":"CIN0393035662VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0393035662.jpg?v=1751196597"},{"product_id":"orphan-book-jan-heller-levi-9781938584039","title":"Orphan","description":"\u003cp\u003ePraise for Jan Heller Levi: \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt's Levi's humanity that ultimately won't let you loose, words as direct as bullets, as kisses.--Bob Holman\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eOrphan\u003c\/i\u003e, Jan Heller Levi's new collection, is an unabashed confrontation with loneliness, otherness, and abandonment. These poems--ancient, immediate, serene, disgruntled, wickedly humorous, unsettlingly earnest--are also daring explorations of what love is. In the new millennium, with so much loss to mourn--and so much more still to lose--\u003ci\u003eOrphan\u003c\/i\u003e contemplates how we make our griefs our tools.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhat Love Is\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eTo forsake all others.\u003cbr\u003eTo float the beloved on your back\u003cbr\u003efrom flood to land, to wrench bread\u003cbr\u003efrom the beggar's hand, snatch\u003cbr\u003ethe oxygen mask from a child's face.\u003cbr\u003eTo ransack hospitals and nursing homes\u003cbr\u003efor drugs to ease the beloved's pain, \u003cbr\u003eto stumble down 101 floors, beloved\u003cbr\u003eslung on your back, not stopping\u003cbr\u003efor the other ones in wheelchairs\u003cbr\u003ewaiting at the landing doors.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJan Heller Levi\u003c\/b\u003e's first collection of poems, \u003ci\u003eOnce I Gazed at You in Wonder\u003c\/i\u003e, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and poems from her second collection, \u003ci\u003eSkyspeak\u003c\/i\u003e, won The Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America. She is editor of \u003ci\u003eA Muriel Rukeyser Reader\u003c\/i\u003e, served as consulting editor for the new edition of \u003ci\u003eThe Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser\u003c\/i\u003e, and is currently writing the biography of Rukeyser. She lives in New York City with her husband, the Swiss novelist and playwright Christoph Keller, and teaches at Hunter College.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50404068131089,"sku":"CIN1938584031G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51055124054289,"sku":"NIN9781938584039","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1938584031.jpg?v=1751187110"},{"product_id":"muriel-rukeyser-reader-book-jan-heller-levi-9780393313239","title":"A Muriel Rukeyser Reader","description":"A Muriel Rukeyser Reader gathers a generous selection of poetry and prose spanning the forty-five years of Rukeyser's writing life. 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