The reader journeys through these poems, circa 1787 to 2013, and emerges realizing that everything is connected-the ways we live, lie, love, and die-the ways we all get over.

"From the moment the poet declares that there's a 'plantation in them lungs,' and sets the stage for a starkly 'muscled music,' you may as well let loose your rigid misconceptions about what poetry can do and steel yourself as it becomes the way your body moves from one exclamation to the other. Each of these lean and urgent poems, bulging with insistent energy and image, is a hallmark of t'ai freedom's fierce inventiveness and refusal to settle for anything that lives its only life on the page. The fact that you aren't ready for this work is exactly why you need it in your life." -Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler, finalist for the National Book Award

"t'ai freedom ford has written a Live/Lie/Love/Die survival guide for survivors of drug wars and hip hop fantasies; a gender-blurred bildungsroman built with the bone of poetry; a battalion of rhyme brilliantly etched across loss and discovery; a celebration of brown-skinned love and a boomboxed declaration of living filled with all the grit and spit it takes to make love last. This book has come just in time for all us who've been under the gun, under false pretense, under arrest, under the influence, and burying our hearts underground. Here we have a Harriet Tubman of a tome with a mission to deliver us from ourselves and unto ourselves, to teach us simply and profoundly how to get over." -Tyehimba Jess, author of leadbelly