So new book is, I think the new book is about.
Well, that book is about noise and how noise struggles
to become language and literature and myth
or something like that.
This new thing is about literacy and types of literacy
and how we value literacy.
And how we think of skin even as a form
of hierarchy and literacy.
And the book is called Skin, Inc.
So I'm going to go through it and talk about it.
And it's also me traveling through
the American and African-American
literary tradition.
So listening to the arguments and styles.
And so dramatic content that I hear
and sort of adding what my grandmother called my own three
cents.
This first thing is called, and they're meant to be percussive.
"My Meter is Percussive."
I'm trying to start fights with a lot of dead people.
[LAUGHTER]
"My meter is percussive.
So throughout this worry, I am rolling my eyes.
I am sucker punching I. The I that
informs these lines It's like only I know I know how.
I am breathing, repairing, breathing.
Half interested in progress and half interested in progression.
Never finished.
I am not a unit of geography or race.
My vocal skin fragments but not like A secretary to eloquence.
If negritude, it fits better than any metaphor
for river, weary mask, or light-skinned religion.
I no longer write white writing.
Yet white writing won't stop writing me.
In life they clutched their purses
because they want you to think you've stolen something.
In art, they clutch their purses because they
know you know they've stolen something.
[LAUGHING]
Most times, yo.
The flow of my own Blackness freedoms to defend me.
This lyric body a prosody sentenced."