A Toast in the House of Friends

Written for her son, Oluchi McDonald (1982–2003), Akilah Oliver’s poems incorporate prose, theory, and lyric performance into a powerful testimony of loss and longing. In their journey through the borderlands of sorrow, they grapple with violence, find expression in chants, and, like the graffiti she analyzes, become a place of public and artistic memorial. “If memory is the act of bearing witness,” she writes, “then the dream is a friend driving us somewhere.”