The sketches, the outlines, and the no apology hang together with the allusions and the hyper self-consciousness of the metafictional narrator like a sliding-tile puzzle. Hum a few bars of ‘Say My Name,’ but in third person plural if that does something for you.” “And you should fill in for yourself the details of that shooting as long as the constants (unarmed men, excessive force, another dead body, another dead body) are included in those details. It happens a second time, toward the end of the story, in a way that feels stronger in its accusation: “You would think with his blue contacts and unnaturally blond hair set against dark chocolate mocha-choca-latte-yaya skin-and yes, there is some judgment in the use of ‘you’-that Riley would date white or Asian women exclusively, or perhaps that he liked men.” But it’s not an accusation rests there, a finger points. Within the first two-hundred words the reader gets called out with a “you” that seems, at first, like a neutral use of the second person. The story is told by a narrator who floats above the action metafictionally hyper-aware and self-conscious. But I want the full picture I don’t want to be left behind and so, like the nerds in Office Space looking up money-laundering in the dictionary, I’m searching for “trap music,” “Bruh-man,” and Donika Kelly online. The first half page of the opening story, “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology,” is thick with cultural references-some low, some high some I know (Sonic the Hedgehog, The Bluest Eye, Drake) and some I don’t ( Disgruntled, Fetty Wap).

It is clear to me from the start that I might not be smart enough for Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ debut collection, Heads of the Colored People (37Ink/Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster) that perhaps I won’t be capable of pulling off this review.

Heads of the colored people stories