Many of the poems in the collection deal with guilt and shame because, for me, those are often the emotions that spur a poem and make me feel I need to write.

I feel like I started to be or become more of an adult at the age of like 12 or 13 — and people say that a lot about Black kids, that we’re forced to grow up in a certain way and quicker.

Suffering is non-negotiable, and I am grateful for how poem-making helps me live with and through what is painful and cherish what is joyful. With all of this in mind, I aim to craft poems that have blood in them, that give something to the reader.

From James Baldwin, we learned how to talk about race, but we, Black men, still very much struggle to talk about masculinity.

I find the process of constructing language to be necessary and brutal.

I wanted to capture the excitement of young lust and romantic relationships that come at the expense of something else; a day of school, a mother’s trust, a friendship, “innocence.”