Technical Difficulties by June Jordan

Distinguished poet, activist, essayist, and teacher. June Jordan offers a variety of contemporary American themes that offers a bracing account of life as it is lived in America. Whether she is discoursing on growing up in Brooklyn with immigrant parents searching for the American dream; the myths of race and class so pervasive in the American psyche; her formation as a writer confronting the romance of the individual artist; Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson; the poverty of American education; the fall of Mike Tyson; or Anita Hill's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, June Jordan is always incendiary.

Her writing is all of it remarkable for its preternatural clarity. Here are essays that constitute a major writer's manifesto of hope, anger and visionary power.