What kinds of errant crystals has Sade LaNay placed upon their throat to make these polyvocalities so audible? So that from the violated archives of Black history, LaNay makes a clearing for a fugitive chorus — poets, organizers, librarians, educators, reverends, —who refuse to negotiate on the prisms of Black life. I Love You and I’m Not Dead requests your care and attention without promising anything in return: clarity, closure, reconciliation. If, as LaNay articulates, the afterlives of chattel slavery are made intimate in the trauma of everyday enfleshment, Black femme languaging, Black femme imaginative labor might be a space to configure radical kinships across time. Who can be ready for the brilliance in these pages, for the (3z (Bdemonic grounds (3y (Bthe book insists upon, for the trajectories LaNay’s poiesis has carved out and to which we must now attend?