Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance by Judy Jordan

Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance by Judy Jordan

Following her critically acclaimed first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, Judy Jordan here returns to a time in her life when she was homeless and working as a pizza deliverer at a Greek immigrant--owned restaurant. She absorbs the life experiences and unmet dreams of her coworkers, the parking lot prostitutes, and the other homeless with whom she shares coffee refills and the warmth of the bus station terminal. Their voices, along with Jordan's, come together in a haunting chorus that bears witness to the misery of poverty in the richest country in the world.Childhood abuse, drug use, violence, disease, and war enter into many of the stories that form this collective tale. Sometimes broken and eerie, sometimes lyrical and beautiful, and other times quirkily humorous, the poems gain an added edginess by the use of fixed forms and the re-imagining of the sonnet in the mouths of the twentieth century's wounded and alienated. Ultimately, Jordan explores the place of beauty, verse, and narrative in helping to move us into a future in which everyone's story is told. ""Tell me Chris are there nights long after the sun's// yolk has broken across the mountains' blue ridge// when time becomes so bold it crawls its way// from hibernation and shimmies naked// and shivering to the trees' highest branches,// when the river weeps so loud and long// the fish choke on their own old sorrows,// when the wild onions close their eyes one by one// and the Queen Anne's Lace fold up// their blood-spotted handkerchiefs// and lie down in ditch weed and sorrel the final time,// nights when the steel band of your ribs tightens// and your hands go cold, nights when you know// you will never see Greece again. Never.

"Jordan is graced with an engagement of the senses that is so precise it seems otherworldly... Her lines are rife with music and a strong elegiac impulse." - Boston Review"

Judy Jordan's first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award, the Oscar Arnold Young Book Prize of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and the Utah Book of the Year Award for Poetry. She teaches at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807129968
ISBN 10	0807129968
Title	Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance
Author	Judy Jordan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Louisiana State University Press
Year published	2005-04-30
Number of pages	80
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.