In the following essay, MacPhail addresses the models of African-American intellectuals which influenced Jordan.

In the following essay, Erickson surveys changes in Jordan's concepts of love and self-determination.

In the following essay, DeVeaux remarks the impact of Jordan's youth on her beliefs about poetry.

In the following essay, Splawn extols Jordan's and Ntozake Shange's call for a New World consciousness.

In the following review, Hacker considers the political nature of Jordan's collectionNaming Our Destiny.

In the following review, Hacker surveys the themes and techniques in Jordan's Selected Poems and evaluates some of the poet's positions and propositions.

In the following essay, Splawn examines the work of Ntozake Shange and June Jordan, in which she finds examples of "a New World aesthetic."

In the following excerpt, Baker explains Jordan's motivation for ignoring Western standards of poetry to create an immediate, direct voice of political activism.

In the following excerpt, Baker reviews Jordan's Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems in the context of contemporary American poetry, pointing out what he perceives as the strengths and weaknesses of Jordan's work.

In the following review, Alexander surveys the range of concerns and discusses the style of address in Jordan's essay collection Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.

In the following excerpt, Brogan situates Jordan in a philosophical context along with poets Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich.

In the following review, Boyd discusses the influence of Whitman evident in Jordan's Passion.

In the following excerpt, Russell illustrates her appreciation of Jordan's Haruko/Love Poems.

In the following review, Randall presents an appreciation of Jordan's skill and thematic range in Haruko/Love Poems.

Keeping the faith is a slogan from the civil rights movement, rarely used nowadays, when cynics clamor: Faith in what?… [Civil Wars resonates] with a powerful faith in the necessity of change. Jordan, who portrays herself as a fighter, struggles not only with the shadowy difficulties of being an intelligent, gifted black woman living in the 20th century but also with specific movements for change by nations, by a people, by the powerless in this century. Her fight is neither a lonely nor a lone one, ...

June Jordan's selected poems ["Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry"] … fall into three classifications: political, personal and experimental. (p. 15) Jordan's experimental impulses fall … into two varieties. One is technical, arty, formalistic, avant-gardiste, in the manner of the New York poets of the 1950's (of whom she was one). I don't mean her work isn't her own or sounds anything like Ashbery or even LeRoi Jones…. But the ...

In the following excerpt, Rothschild favorably reviews Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.

Civil Wars discloses … Jordan's talents as a prose writer…. [It] is a seamless and eloquent personal retrospective, an intellectual and political autobiography…. [Its] backdrop is two decades of social change, with notable failures and triumphs. From the Harlem riots of 1964 to the Miami riots of 1980, Jordan surveys a social and political landscape that is shattered by racial conflict and violence. But Civil Wars is not solely about the complexities of America's racial po...

In the following excerpt, Smith considers the thematic and stylistic features of Jordan's prose.

In the following review, Emanuel acquaints the reader with the theme and voice in Jordan's first collection of poetry.

"Civil Wars" [is] a book of thorough and unwavering radicalism…. [The] articles form a kind of autobiography of thought and feeling, the story of one individual's activism and search for community. June Jordan is a poet, a woman, a black, and these things define the issues that engage her….

[Civil Wars is a] chilling but profoundly hopeful vision of living in the USA. Jordan's vibrant spirit manifests itself throughout this collection of articles, letters, journal entries, and essays. What is fundamental to that spirit is caring, commitment, a deep-rooted belief in the sanctity of life…. As poet, novelist, journalist, scenarist, urban designer, and teacher—June Jordan has always worked hard to keep before us the essential questions of life, death, choice, and honor. She ha...

Passion as defined by Webster is "Emotion as distinguished from reason … affection … suffering … sexual desire." June Jordan's latest book of poems [Passion] deals with all of these emotions and a few more. It is a book that hurts sometimes because passion isn't always sweet. Yet it's necessary; as necessary as realizing the amount of violence that exists right now in so many of our communities, as necessary as humor. June has demonstrated her creativi...

In a portentous foreword [to "Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980"] Jordan acknowledges her debt to Whitman and proposes to update this "white father's" political vision. However, this collection of talk-poems owes much more to the oral tradition of fellow black poets Nikki Giovanni and Imamu Amiri Baraka than to Whitman. Whether it succeeds in applying Whitman's democratic outlook to the modern world will depend very much on the reader's tastes and beliefs....

There's so much right about "Dry Victories"—the two characters, who are alive, funny, bitter, cool; the magnificent selection of photographs: slaves and cotton pickers, Congressmen and civil rights leaders, police clubs and hoses at Birmingham and a bombed church, a smiling Southern President and the casket of a Northern one, the whole pictorial history of three decades of hope, anguish, despair—that it's a shame the book isn't completely successful. The faul...

[In Passion] June Jordan's language is a high energy blend of street and literary idiom and (usually for ironic purposes) the statistics, headlines, and perverse or rhetorical vocabulary of television and newspapers. Irony is basic to Jordan's perception of a violent, antiblack, antifemale culture. This irony is the expressive vehicle of her outrage and sense of the absurd. Jordan's preface to Passion gives a context for understanding the poems. A powerful and privileged minority, Jorda...

Jordan is a poet for many people, speaking in a voice they cannot fail to understand about things they will want to know. [Passion] elucidates those moments when personal life and political struggle, two discrete elements, suddenly entwine…. Her far-ranging sensibility produces intelligent, warm poetry that is exciting as literature, but even more rewarding as one woman's testimony for change. Susan Mernit, "Poetry: 'Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980',�...