Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

The daughter of sharecroppers and raised on a small farm near the Carolinas’ border, Judy Jordan in her first poetry collection transforms the harshness of her youth with the beauty, inventiveness, and musicality of language. Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death haunt Carolina Ghost Woods, which is set amid the lush landscape of the South and enfolds the wildness―inclement and consoling by turns―of nature and agriculture. Jordan, though, reveals compassion as well as passion for her subject matter and the people in her poems, creating lines of hope and chords of ecstatic energy out of despair: “Yet another attempt to find what the guidebooks can’t say / in this place smelling green-walnut bitter / and drifting up at each kicked leaf: / something that promises we will go on.”
Expansive, ambitious, risk-taking, these narrative-lyrics―often elegiac―engage the timeless subjects of absence and distance, using metaphor in a way that surprises the reader to a different level of awareness, “like the years / that have paused to rub their furred mouths against my leg and pass on.” An extraordinary rendering of the mystery, heat, and closeness of the undisclosed, Carolina Ghost Woods offers a poetry of witness that does not sacrifice the aesthetics of language and rhythm: “Here I bring my sorrows / like the delft-blue mussel shells, / fingertip tiny, most beautiful when strewn wide with loss.”

Literature & Fiction

Jordan, Judy

Poetry

LSU Press

Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death are the features of this collection of poetry, set amid the landscape of the South.

Judy Jordan 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.

60 Cent Coffee And A Quarter To Dance: A Poem

Louisiana State Univ Pr

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.

Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance: A Poem

Poetry. "This is a great American poem. Jordan tells the truth of a life as split open by the world--by life on this earth with other kinds of beings, human and other, with dreams and ghosts, machinery, mythology, between the visible and invisible. The language is thick, allusive, rich, dense. She turns scalding materials into gorgeous art. These poems make me think of Hart Crane, of Blake in his visions of heaven and hell, of Whitman at his most woven, and of Gerard Manley Hopkins by which I mean this poetry reaches me like theirs and reminds me of why it matters so much and urges me on."--Adrienne Rich

Hunger

Tinderbox Editions

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Books by Jordan, Judy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jordan, Judy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

60 Cent Coffee And A Quarter To Dance: A Poem

Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance: A Poem

Hunger