Point of View

All of the poems in the collection are spoken in the first person, and there are at least three distinct speakers. In “summer, somewhere,” the speaker is a young black boy who has been killed by a police officer. This speaker bears biographical similarities to the poet, and to the general speaker, but has relationships with other characters that are almost entirely absent in the rest of the collection. The speaker of “recklessly” is Michael Johnson, a figure drawn from current affairs and used as a symbol of the state’s dual punishment of black queer bodies. The speaker in the remainder of the poems is a shifting amalgam of identities rather than a single character; this general speaker does not have a fixed age, gender, history, or set of relationships. They are always black, always interested in men, and almost always HIV-positive. The shifting...