In this superb and eagerly anticipated debut collection by the young African American poet A. Van Jordan, the energy and music of Jordan's language, his honesty of feeling and of truth telling, are matched by his freshness and power. ""His stuff shines, sweat pours off it,"" says Joy Harjo. And there is a kind of solidity and reality in Jordan's poems that display varieties of experience and depths of meditation too rarely found in contemporary American poetry.