Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance: A Poem - Softcover

Jordan, Judy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807129968 ISBN 13: 9780807129968

Publisher: LSU Press, 2005

Synopsis

Following her critically acclaimed first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, Judy Jordan here returns to a time in her life when she was homeless and working as a pizza deliverer at a Greek immigrant--owned restaurant. She absorbs the life experiences and unmet dreams of her coworkers, the parking lot prostitutes, and the other homeless with whom she shares coffee refills and the warmth of the bus station terminal. Their voices, along with Jordan's, come together in a haunting chorus that bears witness to the misery of poverty in the richest country in the world.Childhood abuse, drug use, violence, disease, and war enter into many of the stories that form this collective tale. Sometimes broken and eerie, sometimes lyrical and beautiful, and other times quirkily humorous, the poems gain an added edginess by the use of fixed forms and the re-imagining of the sonnet in the mouths of the twentieth century's wounded and alienated. Ultimately, Jordan explores the place of beauty, verse, and narrative in helping to move us into a future in which everyone's story is told.Tell me Chris are there nights long after the sun's
yolk has broken across the mountains' blue ridge
when time becomes so bold it crawls its way
from hibernation and shimmies naked
and shivering to the trees' highest branches,
when the river weeps so loud and long
the fish choke on their own old sorrows,
when the wild onions close their eyes one by one
and the Queen Anne's Lace fold up
their blood-spotted handkerchiefs
and lie down in ditch weed and sorrel the final time,
nights when the steel band of your ribs tightens
and your hands go cold, nights when you know
you will never see Greece again. Never.

About this title

About the Author

Judy Jordan 's first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award, the Oscar Arnold Young Book Prize of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and the Utah Book of the Year Award for Poetry. She teaches at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale.

From Publishers Weekly

Departing fiercely from her landscape-oriented debut, Jordan's second volume remembers her time working at a pizza joint, "sleeping/ in my truck or if it's winter in empty buildings," mingling with prostitutes and junkies, and trying to understand the inner torments of the immigrants with whom she worked, among them the restaurant's Greek owner, Chris. Jordan tries repeatedly to imagine herself into Chris's childhood in a village ravaged by Nazi atrocities, its "streets filling up with the dead." More impressive and more detailed are pages devoted to Jordan's own "days without food," when she "grabbed bread crusts off deserted plates," "slept in abandoned buildings, and carried/ all I owned slung in a backpack." Jordan compares these struggles to the even more serious troubles of her brother (who stayed at home after she ran away) and of her acquaintance Princess, "on the streets again" with "her needle-scarred skin": "You don't get out of that life, not alive." Though rarely subtle, Jordan's imagination proves consistently effective in its efforts to dramatize these tough lives; "I search for that which will give us all names," she announces, and most of her search succeeds. The title refers to "all-night deli" with "sixty-cent coffee and free refills/ as long as you stay awake." (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0807129968
• ISBN 13: 9780807129968
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 80