This thirtieth-anniversary edition of June Jordan’s foundational poetry program guidebook features a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new preface from Samiya Bashir.If you want to know how to teach poetry—in a university, a high school, at a nature preserve, in a hospital, or in your living room—read this book.June Jordan's Poetry for the People details how to build a grassroots poetry program through a collection of strategies, sample student wo...

Field Theories wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings, Newports, and love, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption vs. the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with live Black bodies. Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love, intent, identity, hybridity, and how we embody these interstices. Albert Murray said, “The second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothin’ but the blues.” So what is the blue of how we treat each oth...

Bending genre as a planetary body might bend spacetime, Bashir’s poems live as music and film, as memoir, observation, and critique, as movement across both cosmic and poetic fields.I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by le...