On the Composition

• “Blue Faces" was triggered by the Kendrick Lamar song bearing the same title, as well as the legendary Roots music video for "What They Do."

• "Conjecture on the Stained Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church" was incited by this image at the historic Atlanta, GA, house of worship formerly pastored by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The poem makes reference to this Sandra Bland dash cam video.
  

• "In My 31st Year" begins with an epigraph from this 1994 2Pac interview.
  

• "Nocturne with Revelations & Militant Black Jesus" was inspired by Public Enemy's 1990 album, Fear of a Black Planet.
  

• "Plea to My Jealous Heart" was written after reading "The Unceasing Prayer of Mount Athos: A Short Trip to the Edge" by Scott Cairns.
  

• "Shibboleth" was inspired by the West Wing episode bearing the same title.
  

• "Silencer on the Arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. After Sassing an Officer Who Assumed He'd Unlawfully Entered His Own Home" makes reference to the so-called "Beer Summit" President Obama hosted at the White House for Gates, the officer, and Vice President Joe Biden. The political optics were a deep source of inspiration for the poem.
  

• "Silencer to the Heart While Jogging Through a Park"'s ending makes reference to George Zimmerman's acquittal in the murder of Trayvon Martin. I watched the verdict being read again and again on CNN, inexplicably.
  

• "Silencer with Blues & Birds on a Wire" was written after the fatal shooting of Philando Castile.

• "Stumped Speech on the Internet" contrasts the image of this viral video, with the murder of Eric Garner, captured via cell phone video.

• "The Trees" was inspired by Nina Simone's rendition of "Strange Fruit" and the corresponding interview woven into this video.

• "Theorizing Wesley: On the African American Nonresident Alien" tries on the persona Kendrick Lamar uses in "Wesley's Theory." The poem began after reading this article about Wesley Snipe's income tax evasion debacle.

“For a while I was worried that I was being silenced, and so, as a kind of therapy, I began writing 'silencers'—poems that address gun violence and police brutality against African Americans in the news, without specifically invoking case details.”

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