[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, Jordan says, counts political poetry, and poetry that anyone can understand, as lesser achievements. I am dubious about Jordan's claiming Walt Whitman as her most important poetic ancestor and dismissing Emily Dickinson as irrelevant. But I am grateful for her articulate attack on the poetry establishment for excluding, through critical and economic censorship, important work by minority poets. (p. 78)

Joan Larkin, "Women's Poetry: Once More with Form," in Ms. (© 1981 Ms. Magazine Corp.), Vol. IX...