Connie Jordan Green

In Darwin's Breath, poems of science and poems of the spirit hold their own beside one another without contradiction. Jesse Graves

In her "household inventory," Green shows how spent days drop poems like seeds in the fertile garden row of one’s personal landscape. This volume is well worth the wait, its body “a receptacle filling, filling.” --Darnell Arnoult

"'Cat got your tongue, Virgil?' Mattie asked. Then she hated herself for saying the words that made her sound just like Gran. "But Virgil wasn't paying any attention to her. He hunched low in the car seat as the armed guard walked toward them. With World War II raging across the oceans, the guards checked everyone who came in or out of the newly built city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Mattie didn't understand what was so important about the city, but she had learned to live with the fences surrounding it and with the guards at all the exits." So begins the story of Mattie and her cousin Virgil, who must learn to live with each other in a strange city where Mattie's father works at a mysterious job. Along with adjusting to life in the strange city of Oak Ridge, where her father works at a mysterious job. The War at Home was placed on the ALA List of Best Books for Young Adults and was a New York City Library Book for the Teen Age.

"Emmy dangled her bare feet in the creek, enjoying the cool water flowing over her dusty toes. ... After a few minutes she stepped into the creek, looking for places where the water would come to her knees. She pulled up her dress and tucked the skirt under her sash. The water rose around her thighs as she waded deeper." Emmy has a rare moment to relax during a summer when she and her brothers and sisters must help their mother feed company employees, their only way of earning money now that Emmy's father has been disabled in a mining accident. Emmy was chosen as a Notable 1992 Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies and was listed by the New York City Library as one of its Books for the Teen Age.

On the jacket cover, poet Bill Brown describes SLOW CHILDREN PLAYING: "Connie Green's imagery often reaches epiphanies reminiscent of [William] Stafford. In 'Sequence for the Dead' black birds perch on morning power lines 'claws / vibrating around the hum of voices...' In 'His Holy Temple' Green pictures her father, 'knees muddy from his prayerful / obeisance to the god of his sacred garden."

"Certainty infuses the poetry of Connie Jordan Green's second collection: 'earth's old reliability,' the patina of memory polished and glowing, the 'broken of the world' held safe, equal praise for ice-brittle winter and summer's fruition. These poems linger but briefly on what might have been.... Green's homebound rituals restore and wring us clean day upon year.... This is the honest work of a master gardener and craftswoman, each bittersweet note without pretense or chaff." Linda Parsons Marion