to women's and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology in the United States. Jordan reveals several issues and important terms regarding race, class, and gender identity. Privilege Jordan repeatedly grapples with the issue of privilege in both her poems and essays, emphasizing the term when discussing issues of race, class, and gender identity. She refuses to privilege oppressors who are similar to or more like certain people than other oppressors might be. She says there should be no thought of privilege because all oppression and oppressors should be viewed equally. Concepts of race, class, and gender "[In 'Report from the Bahamas'] Jordan describes the challenges of translating languages of gender, sexuality, and blackness across diasporic space, through the story of a brief vacation in the Bahamas." Vacationing in the Bahamas, Jordan finds that the shared oppression under race, class, and gender is not a sufficient basis for solidarity. She notes: "These factors of race and class and gender collapse.. .whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection." They may serve well as indicators of commonly felt conflict. Still, as elements of connection, they seem about as reliable as precipitation probability for the day after the night before the day. As Jordan reflects on her interactions with a series of black Bahamian women, from the hotel maid "Olive" to the old women street sellers hawking trinkets, she writes: I notice the fixed relations between these other Black women and myself. They sell, and I buy, or I don't. They risk not eating. I risk going broke on my first vacation afternoon. We are not particularly women anymore; we are parties to a transaction designed to set us against each other. (41) Focusing on her trip's reflections with examples of her role as a teacher advising students, Jordan details how her expectations are constantly surprising. For instance, she recounts how an Irish woman graduate student with a Bobby Sands bumper sticker on her car provided much-needed assistance to a South African student who was suffering from domestic violence. Such compassion was at odds with Jordan's experience in her neighborhood of being terrorized by ethnic Irish teenagers hurling racial epithets. Jordan's concluding lines emphasize the imperative to forge connection actively rather than assuming it based on shared histories: I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us