RavePloughshares\"Dreamlike, polyphonic, multivoiced, sacred, and profane—Erica Dawson’s book-length poem When Rap Spoke Straight to God encapsulates the multifaceted presence of black womanhood in America ... Dawson’s lyric also exists on a higher plane. But as with every other allusion and mode of voice in When Rap Spoke Straight to God, biblical and mythological references come with a side of the prosaic and mundane. Dawson mixes biblical and mythological allusions with references to rap in the same breath ... The many voices of When Rap Spoke Straight to God echo the myriad stories of black America: art and struggle, past and present—and future.\
Alice Bolin
PositiveBroadly\"During a year when male resentment toward women is violently coming to a head—a school shooting brought on by jilted teenage desire, a man driving through a crowd of pedestrians because women won’t have sex with him—a book like Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession feels particularly relevant ... the most interesting parts of the book are the (too infrequent) moments in which Bolin explicitly ties those tropes to social phenomena and statistics in real life—in which we can clearly see how these stories both reflect and perpetuate a dangerous relationship to women ... Presumably because of the intended scope of the book, however, there are few more instances in which Bolin ventures beyond examining media and into the broader conversation about American misogyny and constructed social hierarchies. Finishing the collection, I was left wondering how these depictions relate to things like pick-up artist communities, rape on university campuses, and violence against sex workers.\
