When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again

A dynamic, moving hybrid work that celebrates Black youth, often too fleeting, and examines Black lives lost to police violence.

In this astonishing volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Award–winner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays—Caliban and Sycorax from The Tempest, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, and the eponymous antihero of Othello—to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century?

Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidibé, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words like “fair,” “suspect,” and “juvenile.” He invents a new form of window poems, based on a characterization exercise, to see Shakespeare’s Black characters in three dimensions, and finds contemporary parallels in the way these characters are othered, rendered at once undesirable and hypersexualized, a threat and a joke.

At once a stunning inquiry into the roots of racist violence and a moving recognition of the joy of Black youth before the world takes hold, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again expresses the preciousness and precarity of life.

About the Author: 

A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry, including?The Cineaste, a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and a Lannan Literary Award, among other honors. He is a professor of creative writing at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.