Dust jacket notes: "In Passion, her most exciting work to date, award-winning poet June Jordan marks a new form in her writing. Continuing to address subjects that have earned her a reputation for fierce honesty - street violence, the oppression of women and Blacks, lovemaking, the struggle for identity - she gives her poems new shape with expansive lines, a multitude of voices, and a truly universal scope. These new poems are not just about passion. They are passion. Jordan explains this new direction in her preface, "For the Sake of a People"s Poetry," where she celebrates her discovery of Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman and his literary descendants, among whom she numbers herself. Reflecting on her own goals as a poet, she seeks "poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as unspeakably commonplace, and as musical, as an emergency phone call." She is committed to poetry with "nothing obscure, nothing contrived, nothing an ordinary straphanger in the subway would be puzzled by...It means new, it means big, it means heterogeneous, it means unknown, it means free...It means wild in the sense that a tree growing away from the earth enacts a wild event." This collection fulfills all this and more."