The poetry in this collection felt aurally poetic without consistently feeling emotionally poetic. Keita clearly has a keen ear for consonance, assonance, rhythm, and flow but that ability never fully bridged the emotional distance I felt from the stories she tried to convey. This was particularly disappointing since so many of them are set in my home city, Philly.

Despite my disappointment with this collection, I’d be highly interested in seeing it performed as a choreopoem like Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf or some kind of experimental recording like Marlon T. Riggs’ film, Tongues Untied. I felt early on that these poems would likely have landed differently for me if I had heard them read/performed. Now that I’ve finished the entire collection, I feel more strongly that the messages and themes of the collection would evoke the intended emotions more consistently if they were combined with a performance element.

After reading Maud Martha earlier this year, I expected that I would enjoy Brooks’ first collection of poetry more than I did her prose. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I found much of this collection simplistic in an almost juvenile way and lacking the emotional and technical precision I look for in poetry. There were a handful of poems that managed to stand out due to their weighty subject matter and strong thematic progression (e.g., “the mother,” “Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” “the murder”), but there weren’t enough gems in the collection to make this book truly shine.

To me, the best poetry collections are those that provoke me to think deeply and feel deeply. While this collection felt like it had the potential to do both, it never quite lived up to that potential. The authors too often prioritized intellectual musing over emotional resonance and emotional meandering over thoughtful use of poetic technique which resulted in a work filled with enough sparks of emotional and intellectual depth to keep me reading but not enough to have a deep emotional or intellectual impact. Despite not loving this collection, I still recommend giving it a try if only to bear witness to a reasonable attempt to argue for the centering of lesbian perspectives and experiences in the poetic canon.