word time

by Devorah Major

"This former San Francisco Poet Laureate and worldly cosmonaut handles politics, war, and love in equal measure as the best poets of the people do. Pablo Neruda. Bob Kaufman. June Jordan. Wanda Coleman. Ears to the ground and eyes to the sky."—Giovanni Singleton, author of Ascension

A cosmic vision of the nature of being, wedded to a streetwise indictment of the post-colonized world.

Hearing Osage Indian artist Duane BigEagle pose the question "How old is your language?" set devorah major thinking about language and what language was "hers." The result is word time, a collection of poems organized around grammatical categories. The book creates connections, not through the traditional meanings of the parts of speech that become phrases, sentences, lines, poems, but through the relationship between infinite time and the finite human endeavors of healing, and of assault. It interrogates the birth and rebirth of humankind, and specifically of humans born of Africa and the African diaspora, a subset and superset of that humanity, grounded in the planet, galaxy, and universe where humanity was born.

Juxtaposing the archetypal with the specific, word time ranges in scope from Yoruba fertility myths to the racist justification of slavery in Florida's social studies curriculum, traveling through space and time as it contemplates the horrors of ecological destruction and the perpetual capacity of humanity to survive, heal and move forward in a universe that is constantly transforming. It takes a circular view of our species from its origins to the fact of its inevitable future demise, telling the story of humans then, as spirit and myth, now, as war and oppression, and in the future, as memory.

104 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2025

About the author

Born and raised in California but traveling throughout the United States and Europe, Asia and parts of the Caribbean devorah major served as San Francisco Poet Laureate 2002 through 2006. In addition to being a poet she is a performer, lecturer, fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and editor. A trained actress and former dancer, she approaches poetry as both a written and performing art.

--from the author's website

Reviews

[Melissa Rochelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesse went out of town a couple of weeks ago and I was left to my own devices at Burton Barr while G was in musical theatre class, so I wandered the poetry shelves and wondered at the selection. I checked out several, including a Ross Gay collection that I read that day. I checked out volumes by Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, and Anne Carson (names I recognized); collections by Rosmarie Waldrop, Marissa Davis, and devorah major (new-to-me poets); and a giant anthology of ecopoetry. Then they were all buried on our table under stacks of more books until today when I had to hunt down a book that was overdue (holds...why do people want to read the same books I want to read?!).

The first I picked up was the Marissa Davis collection, which was doing too much for me today — or I'm not smart enough to take in the technicalities of form that fill it (which seems most likely). But this devorah major hit. word time is thought-provoking, very much set in the here and now; lyrical, you can hear the beat of the words; and clever, with dissection of meek vs. gentle, (in)sanity ("very sanely become altogether mad"), and reminders of our brief human lifespans in the grand scheme of the universe.

[Bobby Crane · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5

picked this up because I wanted to buy a book from an SF writer while I was at City Lights, and i am so glad i did. it's the first book of poetry i've read in a really long time, and it honestly made me so excited to dive deeper into this form. there are so many great observations in here about humanity and violence and history and time -- written in such a compelling way that necessitates multiple re-reads.

this collection made me feel inspired to write, which is like, the highest compliment I feel like I can give a book!