Jazz June

Clifford Thompson has skillfully captured in words a distinct era of American history, the specific feel over time of two major cities (Washington and New York), an intimate glimpse of the complexity of race and masculinity, and the small details of family, love, ambition, fear, fatherhood, and aging that make up a life. It is a charming, quiet but powerful, well-crafted collection.

-- Dinty W. Moore * author of Between Panic & Desire *

Clifford Thompson is an essayist of the finest order.

-- Jerald Walker * author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays *

Jazz June [is] a collection of 22 essays by Clifford Thompson in which he recounts his obstacles not as defining wounds but as motifs to incorporate into his own discursive but always guided narrative. As a personal essayist, he emphasizes gratitude over grievance.

-- Elizabeth Bales Frank * On the Seawall *

Thompson’s strong, casual prose line immediately makes him an interesting protagonist; he writes movingly about fatherhood or a bit mordantly about no longer being young. Although the contents are evenly divided between the two great cities of Thompson’s life, the sections about New York are the more evocative by far, from the inevitable commentary about the subway system to the strangely persistent defensiveness over whether or not he really belongs. A flavor of hard-won life wisdom gradually emerges.
A companionable, often insightful collection.

* Kirkus Review *

Across twenty-two essays, arranged in a loose chronology, [Thompson] reflects on childhood, parenthood, life in Brooklyn and the experience of being an African American man in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. . . . More moments of critical sharpness might have deepened the collection, but Jazz June remains a lyrical and attentive meditation on the rhythms of ordinary life and the subtle shapes a self can take.

-- Douglas Field * Times Literary Suppleme