This is the kind of book I want to read and write: a meditation on poetics of person, ancestry and place; Hayes opens the world of Etheridge Knight, a "black poet, ex con, conman, teacher, junkie, son” who influenced and was influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Robert Bly, Claudia Rankine, and Terrance Hayes, among others. This is a book where if you did not know who Etheridge Knight was, you want to read him. And if you did, you want to re-read him, and those who are his contemporaries. Hayes gifts us a homage and a master class on poetry of the soul and the flesh; a collection of essays as “motley, adrift” as a poet's life can be.