"Kiese Laymon is a griot that effortlessly blends fact, fiction, hope, despair, southern blackness, and honesty into the most beautifulest of thangs that demands your attention and won't let go until Kiese lets you loose. A dazzling narration of vulnerability and what it means for black men to be honest and speak their truth to power." --Regina N. Bradley, author of Chronicling Stankonia: the Rise of the Hip Hop South " Good, God by Kiese Laymon truly astonished me. There is just so much value in what Laymon is doing here, showing us the revolutionary things an artist can do and say on the page; the relentless courage it takes to be this honest and vulnerable. Line for revelatory line, nobody writing today is really fucking with Laymon. What he did here was give us something gospel, something holy, something that loves and chastises in the right way. I will be reckoning with this book until the day I die because there is endless truth and wisdom in it to uncover.
The bottom line is this: Good, God is a masterwork and Kiese Laymon is a master teacher." --Robert Jones, Jr., author of The Prophets "Kiese Laymon's Good, God does the difficult work of understanding what it means to revise our relationship to an irreversible past, to our memory of it, and to the future we write with it. In this marvelous, vulnerable book, Laymon traces the loops of space-time that comprise the collision of memory and story, that fabric that makes generations, linking children to grandparents, great grandparents, and beyond. I wish I could share this book with my Grandma. I know I'll be discussing it with her in my head. Good, God. demands much of us--and thank G-d it does.
" --Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Edge of Space-Time "In 'Book of Job,' Nneka sings, 'when we die, we love.' So I don't guess vampires--and ghouls determined to prowl graveyards--feature that song. And they won't read Good, God; they'll turn back to their mirrors where they don't have to reflect or live or die. But we who are trying to know that we are the rough drafts of our dead, we trying to live like we are our--first-, second-, and third-person--experiences here, we know that we are each other's only mirrors. And so Good, God invites us to our deepest social seeing with Kiese's art a trusted busted reckless priceless guide to braveries personal familial social political. We've all known and been ghouls; we've chosen our graveyards to prowl. In 'Book of Job,' Nneka sings: 'honesty is intelligence.' In that light, and by the pressure of a life-giving ultimatum called revision, sometimes also known as parenthood, Good, God burns through seemingly all fear to an accuracy--without which there's no honesty--that is the only hope for our intelligence; it better be, cause when the lights go out--and they're out--and things go "black as life," we is the only clothesline we got left.
" --Ed Pavlic, author of Call It In the Air "In Good, God , Laymon further proves he is the most honest writer of his generation. To experience his prose is to experience his courage, and to experience his courage is to bear witness to his love of Mississippi, his people, and anyone willing to engage with the complex funk of it all." --Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down.