Whether writing about history, Black lives, family, or love and sexual passion, Opal Palmer Adisa has an acute eye for the contraries of experience. Her Caribbean has a dynamic that draws from its dialects of oppression and resistance; her childhood includes both the affirmation of her parents that makes her 'leap fences' and the 'jeer of strange men on the street/that made your feet stumble'; and men are portrayed both as predators and as the objects of erotic desire.