Love Poems

A landmark collection of love poetry by the most widely published African American poet of her time, tracing the arc of a queer relationship and including some of her most famous poems

Foreword by aja monet • Afterword by Adrienne Rich

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

June Jordan was the first major Black poet to publish a collection composed entirely of love poems. Here, in searingly beautiful poems about desire, compassion, and resistance, she traces the arc of a faltering love affair with a woman identified by only her first name, Haruko, and explores the love of self, the love of motherhood, and love in relation to a world both beautiful and cruel.

Breathtakingly romantic, lyrically inventive, and politically potent, and featuring passionate, yearning odes, blistering diatribes, and some of her most famous poems—among them “Resolution # 1,003,” “Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem,” and “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”—Love Poems is the work of a poet who, like her contemporaries Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and bell hooks, spoke truths that continue to reverberate from the second half of the twentieth century well into the twenty-first.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.