… [a] remarkable book of essays … The earliest pieces (including the title essay) date from 2014, but most are essentially contemporary, and their cumulative range and force are as exhilarating as they are compelling … The book’s tone is broadly inviting … McCarthy writes with equal authority and scrutiny about trap music and the seventeenth-century Spanish painters Diego Velázquez and Juan de Pareja, the latter a black man and a freed slave of the former. In his brilliant essay ‘To Make a Poet Black’—originally delivered as a lecture in his Introduction to Black Poetry course—McCarthy brings together Sappho, Kerry James Marshall, Phillis Wheatley, Theodor Adorno, and Ntozake Shange in what feels an entirely organic exploration of the cultural reception of two necessary female poets, Sappho and Wheatley … The finest essays in this book function like origami, folding together the apparently disparate into a unique and seemingly inevitable form … he believes passionately in possibility, and a revolutionary, almost jovial sense of mission suffuses the book.
