Jesmyn Ward has assembled a collection as vital to living in our times as Coates’s letter and Rankine’s poem ... To read The Fire This Time is to feel what it is like to live through a terrible resurgence of our central never-dormant idea about race. Namely, that a black or brown life is of less value than a white one ... an extraordinary anthology.
...[a] wise and wide-ranging chorus of voices ... Perhaps what The Fire This Time does best is to affirm the power of literature and its capacity for reflection and imagination ... This is a book that seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward.
...a stirring anthology that takes more cues from Baldwin than just its title ... the joy and pain of existing while black is what’s celebrated here. That is to the credit of Ward, and the writers (like Edwidge Danticat, Kiese Laymon and Isabel Wilkerson) whose works she arranges in this volume ... The pain of black life (and death) often inspires flowery verse, but every poem and essay in Ward’s volume remains grounded in a harsh reality that our nation, at large, refuses fully to confront.
Ward’s team delivers the goods, in three sections commenting on the past, current and future states of African-Americans ... The writing is impressive: literary, insightful, urgent, timely, a bracing antiseptic to still open racial wounds ... Fifty-three years, two civil rights movements and one black president after Baldwin’s original, the problem with a book like this is that we still need a book like this.
...illuminating and even cathartic ... Ward's reflections on race and racism, along with those of 17 other writers, are thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful ... The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify.
A few essays scratch at the surface only to find more surface. They’re the mussels, in this fragrant bowl, that fail to open ... There are five excellent reasons to buy this book: The essays by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Carol Anderson, Kevin Young, Garnette Cadogan and Ms. Ward. Each is so alive with purpose, conviction and intellect that, upon finishing their contributions, you feel you must put this volume down and go walk around for a while.
...we might call this an all-star team of black American writing. And while each possesses a distinctive voice, all of the pieces pulse in rhythm with undercurrents of grief as well as hope ... Ward has placed the pieces together brilliantly. This is no random assortment of writings. It’s is a composition made by someone who is as careful a reader as she is a writer. Ward is attuned to the spirit of this moment and she is its conductor, gifting insight to us all ... both timely and potentially timeless.
The Fire This Time is exactly what we need to bolster our grief. It’s a space no one should have to had create, a space nobody should need to inhabit, but wishful thinking has never deterred necessity. We need what we need ... Ward has created a vehicle for dark and darker voices. Some of them squinting. All of them ambivalent. Strains of ordinary perseverance in extraordinary times gain velocity here.
...the desire to offer thoughtful reflection while setting the record straight pulses resoundingly through the essays and poems Ward has collected. The lineup of stellar contributors invites comparison to a major-league all-star team, with a tremendously gifted writer patrolling every position. The essays and poems stand on their own, but together, they also build into a powerful collective statement.
The Fire This Time insists on the humanity and individuality of its subjects ... The Fire This Time shows that very little about our 'racial nightmare' has changed since Baldwin made that optimistic prediction. But it continues to argue that radical love can transform the world.
I’d like to shower thousands of copies of The Fire This Time on a Trump rally. I know I’m dreaming, but indulge me. Maybe a few will thumb through Jesmyn Ward’s compilation of essays and poems by young African-American writers, and settle on a page that hits a nerve and starts peeling away the layers. Maybe it will help to hear from actual black people that the one thing 'all blacks' agree on is that it is dangerous to be young and black, and then learn the history of why that remains so.
