In a fearless love letter to his mother–a daughter of the Great Migration who dared to go West and never gave up in her ill-fated quest for companionship–and his ditch-digger daddy calling from the other side, Stewart Shaw takes readers on a Freudian journey that plumbs the ache so many same-gender-loving men know too well. Ten he digs deeper into his sage soul’s diasporic wisdom and dares to pose questions as insightful as Can bodies gone for centuries uphold their outlines? With his apostasies and confessions, Shaw invites us into a stark mirror of ourselves. Take a look, if you dare, world. Behold, how beautiful, how right-on-time, how unapologetically black this American voice is.

–L. Lamar Wilson, PhD, author of Sacrilegion and Prime