The ancient Jewish tradition of midrash, in which rabbis tell stories to fill gaps in the scriptural narrative, has long fascinated me. Rather than being viewed as heretical and extra-scriptural, midrash lives side by side with the sacred text it expands and riffs off of, an act of engaging with old stories in fresh ways. Midrash lives on in the practice of contemporary writers—Jewish and otherwise—who use similar storytelling techniques to approach scripture from an infinite array of angles, often exploring the perspectives of characters that do not play a main role in the original text. It’s the balance that midrash strikes between faithfulness and innovation, I think, that intrigues me: in telling new perspectives, new narratives, we declare our loyal—though sometimes complex—relationship to the original.

In his poetry collection When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, A. Van Jordan is engaged in a similar project, although the canonical text he riffs off of is not scripture but Shakespeare. The collection both imagines the perspectives of Black characters in The Tempest, Othello, and Titus Andronicus, and draws parallels between these experiences and life in contemporary America. The result is a wide-reaching and textured collage of Shakespearean allusion, current events, and reflection on the surprising ways that tradition and innovation collide.

The title of Jordan’s collection is taken from a quote from Caliban of The Tempest, so the first section fittingly begins with an exploration of Caliban’s character and relationship with his mother, the witch Sycorax. Slotted in between persona poems from Caliban and Sycorax’s perspectives are poems about 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed by police in Cleveland in 2014. In these persona poems, the distinctions between worlds are blurred: for instance, Sycorax, described as a single mother, worries when imagining Caliban pulled over by the police (“How Far Away is Caliban’s Light?”). In giving Caliban, Sycorax, and Tamir all the careful authorial attention that a protagonist would receive, Jordan centers the tender mother-son relationship, and the fear for a child’s safety in a world hostile to Blackness, that link the three.

Jordan’s nimble use of form becomes more and more evident throughout the collection, another sign of his balance between tradition and innovation. He uses a grid format to explore how Prospero, Caliban, and Sycorax perceive and are perceived by the world, and definition poems to explore the multiplicity of often-racialized connotations within words like “fair,” “suspect,” and “grandfather.” One of the cleverest surprises of the collection is in the fourth section, “When I Waked,…,” which involves an interview format and a healthy dash of metacognition.

Jordan’s project is capacious, so the collection is sometimes cut with explanatory prose as he introduces news stories or explains context. However, the poems are grounded by moments of lyricism that ache with both lost innocence and liberating joy, sometimes at once; for instance, Jordan writes of Tamir Rice that

            the opportunities for joy
presented themselves
in more colors than the boy
could name, so he chose Black,
enjoying them all.

Likewise, the poem “Such Sweet Thunder” employs a stunningly crafted refrain that emulates the jazz to which it refers. And Jordan is a master of voice—pieces like the poem “Rokia’s Parents” and the interview “When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again” that rely heavily on dialogue crackle with realism and humor. The tonal shift in the poem “Aaron the Moor” from “When we bring others into our lives, / we bring all their life into ours” to “But what’s the deal with this brother? / Jumping in bed with a Goth girl like that” reflects Jordan’s project of traversing the distance between canon and innovation, traditional and colloquial, in microcosm.