Structure

The Fire This Time is split into three sections: Legacy, Reckoning, and Jubilee. The Legacy section has six essays. The Reckoning section has six essays. The Jubilee section has two essays.

Each of the sections covers a wide variety of topics. In the Legacy section, the essays cover topics from ancestry to the legacy left behind by writing legends. For Reckoning, the essays grapple with parenting while black, walking while black, the definition of blackness, and more. In the Jubilee section, the essays center around love in the form of true allyship and parental love and joy.

Each section begins with a poem, so there are three poems total. The poems are short and vary widely in structure and content. “Homegoing AD” for instance, has a section that zigzags to mimic someone running from an alligator. Every line of “Queries of Unrest” begins with “maybe.” Each of...