Killer of Sheep

Killer of Sheep* A. Van Jordan (bio) Men with the gentlest hands, men with boys at home, with wives to love, get up every day and work in the slaughterhouse, draining the blood out of themselves just to make an honest case for their misery. And it’s beautiful to behold endurance in the worker who knows love motivates more than money. Sometimes a knee above a shaven calf on a woman, the thought of his finger making circles on her knee, while she sits next to him on a couch is enough . . . Men learn, while still a boy, how a pile of rocks can build a castle worth defending, how when riding a bike, falling can even be called play. By the time he’s a man, he knows what it takes to lift a car-engine up three flights of stairs; it takes more than two hands, which just seems right in the scheme of pain. Even a little boy, when it’s all recalled later as a man, wanted someone to scold him, so a bloody job will one day satisfy more than fast money, so he knows to seek help to find a smile, when all the day offers grimaces back. [End Page 3] A. Van Jordan A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise, published by Tia Chucha Press (2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. His second book, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, published by W.W. Norton & Co. (2004), was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award and listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times. Jordan was also awarded a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2004 and a Pushcart Prize in 2006, 30th Edition. Quantum Lyrics was published in July 2007 by W.W. Norton & Co. He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), and a United States Artist Williams Fellowship (2008). He is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Footnotes * For Charles Burnett, 1981 Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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