I don’t pretend to understand poetry, I admit I sometimes struggle with traditional poetry, however this “modern” jumbled mess of words and phrases thrown together arbitrarily leave me with a disconnected feeling, and I find it very difficult to feel anything! I mean there’s literally an entire page dedicated to two lines of a “poem”! How am I supposed to get anything out of that?

That said, I do get the many important issues Smith discusses in this collection, from race, police brutality and murder, being gay and black in America, the experience of being HIV positive, and more. These topics are very interesting and important, sometimes a longer poem would help me understand what the author is trying to say, but for the others, the style just makes it hard for the point to get across in my opinion.