“[Toomer] is American literature’s greatest, most enduring enigma. . . . But here, in this lush, bleak book, in his evocation of the world as it is instead of how it ought to be, something hardier, more useful is conveyed — of the possibilities for epiphany, the reliable consolations of love and revenge. And in his style — this pastiche of poem, autobiography and fable — there is an integration of the self that the life never afforded.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
“Over the past 95 years this Harlem Renaissance ‘experiment’ — a mosaic of poems, vignettes and short stories, many of these last being shocking studies of loneliness and the longing for love — has risen from relative obscurity to become what it always was, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century American literature.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
