This luminous new volume of narrative poetry takes us to the movies—from Metropolis to Blazing Saddles—and uses each film to meditate on issues of race, growth, identity, and memory. At the collection’s center is a sonnet sequence in the voice of filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, where Jordan struggles with the disjuncture between the ugly racism and powerful artistic achievements of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Jordan is an award-winning author of three previous volumes of poetry in which he weaves multiple personnas, fragmented worlds, and multiple art forms together in a single voice that is entirely his own. In Rise (2001), winner of the PEN/Josephine Miles Book Award, Jordan harmonized with musicians: blues lyrics and field hollers infused and shaped his lines; jazz supplied a lustrous ambience via such heroes as Ellington, Davis, and Monk. In M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award, he spelled along with 1935 teenager MacNolia Cox, the first African-American finalist of the National Spelling Bee Competition. In Quantum Lyrics (2007), the world of Jordan’s poetry became a multiverse populated by physicists and comic book superheroes alike. Jordan, who has also been awarded a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, lives in Ann Arbor and is a professor at U-M.