Maxine Beneba Clarke writes through growing up Black in Australia in a mosaic of poetry, fragments, essays, moments that feel almost too small to matter until they accumulate into something hard to ignore.

Race is looked at in the classrooms, in language, in the offhand violences that happen day after day. Like most voices that understand what it means to live life seeing the shape of it for what it is, the prose is sharp, funny when it wants to be, and completely unwilling to sand anything down for comfort. You feel the craft, but you also feel the refusal behind it. 

It reads quickly. It sits for longer than that.

Hachette Australia paperback, 2016. Signed inscription to previous owner on title page. Very good condition overall. Clean text block, light edge wear.