Since I'm reading this as part of my New Year's Resolution to by-God read more books that are explicitly about race, I am specially noticing the parts I don't understand here. This is opaque to me; Hemphill's experience is so foreign that I am struggling to understand the emotional landscape here. Which is my flaw and not Hemphill's.

That said, I can judge the introduction: it's not very good. It's rambling, unorganized, and too long; it didn't add anything to my experience of reading the actual text, I think.

The combination of prose and poetry in the same volume was a struggle for me, although Hemphill can certainly write both. I liked the essays better than the poetry, by and large, but that is probably because I couldn't enter into the poems with the confidence I could the essays. "Voices" is a fabulous piece, the essay criticizing Mapplethorpe rocks, and "Ceremonies" is chilling in its description of the sexual culture in which Hemphill came to adulthood. ( )