"I began writing The Cold Song in the months following my fathers death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: What now? How to proceed?"

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In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

— June Jordan