Opal Palmer Adisa employs the modes of autobiography, dramatic monologues, lyrical observations, encomiums, prose poems and prophetic rants in a collection that enacts the construction of a sense of identity whose dimensions encompass a Rastafarian sense of inner 'i-ness', gender, race, geography, the spiritual, the social and the political. In several poems, Palmer speaks through the voices of iconic historical figures such as Phyllis Wheatley, who after the process of cultural loss and enforced imitation finds her own voice, or a ghostly Nat Turner who speaks as an invisible presence in the white world storing away his knowledge of that world to use the next time round. There are contemporary icons, too, such as the late Audrey Lorde, Barbara Christian and June Jordan, strong women who are held up as models of writers committed to the responsibility of speaking out, of pursuing beauty in their writing and personal relationships, of supporting community and fighting injustice.
Palmer speaks more directly of self in poems that explore the experience of being a Black person in the world of Oakland, poems which range from a pained but empathetic response to the racial transformations of Michael Jackson, her experience of Black male chauvinism in the classroom and a moving account of the senility of a beloved grandmother. The empathy in Opal Palmer Adisa's work is nowhere more clearly seen than in "Ancestry", a poem that rejects the customary practice of choosing only the past's heroes to relate to, embracing both rebels and betrayers, fighters and the acquiescent: 'i claim all of them/ and you who turned against us/ and led them to our secret place.../ i claim you aunt jemima/ and uncle tom.../ we are all one family...' Then, almost at the end of the collection, comes a poem called "Beyond the Frame" that in its oblique but inescapable images of childhood sexual abuse, suddenly begins to suggest what kind of act of will has gone into the construction of an 'I' who is 'an incisor gnawing my way.'