Testify

This award-winning debut book of poetry examines race, masculinity, religion, class, and the African American experience in the American Midwest. A book of elegiac ambivalence,  Testify ’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a Bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with k