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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. The final line of the poem "Queries of Unrest" references "trying to save them the time of" doing what "to darkness when all they have to do is close their eyes" (100)?

2. To what city did the author of "Black and Blue" move in 1996 in order to attend college?

3. At what university did Kevin Young teach for five years?

4. Kevin Young begins his essay "Blacker Than Thou" by discussing which movie in which Steve Martin plays the lead role?

5. What two qualities of his grandmother's does Kiese Laymon say he did not understand or feel inspired by until he heard his first OutKast album?

Short Essay Questions

1. How is paradox employed within the poem "Queries of Unrest" and to what effect?

2. What is People's Justice and what is the organization's goal?

3. How does Emily Raboteau say she wishes to distinguish her role as a mother from both types of mothers depicted in the widely-circulated comic entitled "Still Two Americas"?

4. What does the author of "Composite Pops" say that a boy must do if he is "not blessed with a father or gifted with a dynamic stand-in" (180)?

5. Name at least three actions that the author of "Composite Pops" attributes to all of the men he describes as Pops, his composite father.

6. How is repetition employed within the poem "Queries of Unrest" and to what effect?

7. Who does Claudia Rankine name as the person who created "a new pathway for how to think about a lynched body" (147) and what does she mean?

8. How does the poem "Queries of Unrest" connect to the part of the collection that it opens, entitled Reckoning?

9. What was the object mentioned in the very first lines of OutKast's music first heard by Kiese Laymon and why did the object's mention draw him in?

10. At the start of the essay "The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning," why do the two women talking about one's recent arrival of a son laugh when the new mother says her first thought had been how she could get her baby boy out of America?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Several essays in the collection The Fire This Time point out differences between being black in America and being black in other parts of the world. Choose three of these essays and use concrete details and examples from each in order to make a claim regarding each author's message about the contrast between black life in America versus black life in other areas of the world.

Essay Topic 2

Conduct an analysis of the rhetorical devices used by the author of "The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning" in order to assert her claim that shared grief is the key to unifying the United States in its pursuit of racial equality.

Essay Topic 3

Choose two of the poems contained in The Fire This Time and write an essay comparing and contrasting their respective messages and literary techniques.

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