When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again: Poems

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...