Review of Akwaeke Emezi’s Content Warning: Everything

     At one point in their debut poetry book, Content Warning: Everything, New York Times best-selling author Akwaeke Emezi (they/them) is “a ragtag doll / scraps from men or places where I left myself / even when my pieces were taken…”  By the end of this poem “confessions,” Emezi owns up to these broken pieces, “these offerings / to fill the negative altars burning inside me, father / forgive me, everything eventually is always mine.” Emezi’s empowering voice never shies away from being themself and taking responsibility as they reimagine this Catholic ritual. In this collection, writing of trauma within the intersectional spaces of identity, so prevalent in today’s poetry in such varied poets from Jake Skeets through Elizabeth Acevedo, Emezi transforms the oppressive violence of the male, colonizing, Catholic worlds in which Emezi finds themself—the poems’ speakers revealing themselves as female, Igbo, and bisexual. Emezi’s not so much a victim as an outsider—and one of the “little gods”—who survives and is intent on thriving, becoming free as themself through blurring, breaking, and reconfiguring the boundaries of Catholic norms, the body, and even of language itself.

     In this forty-seven page collection without sections, Emezi rarely uses punctuation and only uses one capital letter (“a little Black girl” in “july 28”). The language is jolting, the lines ever-flowing, as in…