PositivePIttsburgh Post-GazetteAs a Black man myself, I appreciated the choice to not over explain the Black references. Doing so would have made them seem less culturally significant than their white counterparts ... Similarly, the majority of the text is purposefully written in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), sometimes called Ebonics. For the most part Evans and Holman, both poets by training, do a masterful job of presenting this dialect as natural rather than forced. While some readers (particularly white ones) might at first be put off by the unfamiliar terminology, verbiage, phonetic spelling, the occasional usage of the n-word, and the quite liberal usage of the f-word, the slang is consistent enough that it typically feels quite organic. Like the choice to use black cultural references, the usage of AAVE goes a long way towards normalizing the Black experience ... However, the more serious topics are perhaps where the book sees some trouble. When addressing particular somber subjects—like the death of Breonna Taylor—Evans and Holman suspend the usage of AAVE and revert to Standard Written English (SWE) or White English. In effect, the authors code-switch, a process well-known to most Black Americans, when they feel that it is imperative that white readers understand their message ... it has the unfortunate side-effect of trivializing the predominantly AAVE segments of the rest of the book ... That said, overall, the collection is not only entertaining but thoughtful ... What they have done is packaged a selection of the pop cultural discourse the African-American community has always engaged in and made it accessible to all.
