SOURCE: A review of Who Look at Me, in The New York Times Book Review, November 16, 1969, p. 52.

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

Opposite the title page of Who Look at Me is a painting simply entitled "Portrait of a Gentleman." The gentleman is black. June Jordan's book suggests all black Americans are as unknown as the anonymous early 19th-century artist and his subject.

"We do not see those we do not know," she writes. "Love and all varieties of happy concern depend on the discovery of one's self in another. The question of every desiring heart is, thus, 'Who Look at Me?' In a nation suffering fierce hatred, the question—race to race, man to man, and child to child—remains: 'Who Look at Me?' We answer with our lives. Let the...