A book of electrifying poems by the acclaimed author of Push ("Brutal . . . redemptive"—Newsweek) and American Dreams ("Her insights are precise, terrifying, and ultimately hopeful. She sings in many voices, and every one of them cries out for justice" —Dorothy Allison).

Alive with the emotional honesty and intellectual force for which Sapphire has been admired as both a writer and a performance artist, these forty-seven poems take us into America's past and present, bearing testimony to the black experience in a country fragmented by war, racism, and urban and domestic violence. They tell the story of a search for the complicated spiritual path back to one's roots, a story of family, race, and self-transformation.

A provocative book that astonishes by the power of its language.