[In the following review, Emanuel acquaints the reader with the theme and voice in Jordan's first collection of poetry.]

Opposite the title page of Who Look at Me is a painting simply entitled "Portrait of a Gentleman." The gentleman is black. June Jordan's book suggests all black Americans are as unknown as the anonymous early 19th-century artist and his subject.

"We do not see those we do not know," she writes. "Love and all varieties of happy concern depend on the discovery of one's self in another. The question of every desiring heart is, thus, 'Who Look at Me?' In a nation suffering fierce hatred, the question—race to race, man to man, and child to child—remains: 'Who Look at Me?' We answer with our lives. Let the human eye begin unlimited embrace of human life."

By intermixing 27 paintings of black Americans from colonial times to the present with an original, understated but intense poem that comments indirectly on the paintings and enhances their meaning, she has given children a splendid opportunity to "begin unlimited embrace of human life."

Her text begins with a question: "Who would paint a people black or white?" The implied answer is that centuries of derogatory generalizations about Negroes have done precisely that. Consequently Who Look at Me displays paintings of black people in all their human and historical variety: slave, revolutionary, sailor, lover, artist, civil rights marcher.

The accompanying poem reveals its unity through repeated words, and themes and records with psychological deftness the evolution of the black man's racial pride. In it Miss Jordan says pithily to whites, "To begin is no more agony than opening your hand." She cautions them "I am black alive and looking back at you." Her black man is the seed that "disturbed a continent," the truth-teller saying "NO / to a carnival run by freaks." Having survived "the crazy killing scorn" of his oppressors in "a hungerland / of great prosperity," he sees America as "the shamescape" and "that lunatic that lovely land / that graveyard," where he dies ritualistically. And this grim vision is supported by a final reminder:

     "I trust you will remember how we tried to love
     above the pocket deadly need to please
     and how so many of us died there
     on our knees."

Each picture is worth framing, and each section of poetry has lines that we must remember.