The general speaker

Besides “summer, somewhere” and “recklessly,” which have more defined speakers, the narrating character throughout the collection is not a single voice, but a shifting amalgam with strong situational similarities to the poet. The speaker is always queer and black, and usually HIV-positive, but varies in age, experience, and personal history. Regardless of shifting life details, the speaker is always concerned with themes of racial injustice, queer sexuality, and HIV/AIDS stigma and treatment.

One of the most fundamental variations in the speaker’s identity is that of gender. In some poems, the speaker is explicitly or implicitly male. In “it won’t be a bullet,” for example, the third stanza begins “i am not the kind of black man who dies on the news” (28). The title of “a note on the phone app that tells me how far i am from other men’s mouths” refers...