Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings

Bestselling, National Book Award–nominated novelist and poet Jeffers (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois) repeatedly demonstrates that the past and present can never be mutually exclusive. Her newest essay collection continues to excavate gardens and graveyards, in search of roots and ghosts, all while keeping her finger on the pulse of the violence and vulnerability growing around us. Like Jeffers’s fiction, her essays have an expansiveness. They are not easy in terms of subject matter or prose, but much like Toni Morrison’s writing (which inspires Jeffers’s sense of rememory), they are well worth digging into. She brings up key concepts in womanist and feminist theory while also bringing in moments of disruption, including her own identity as a rape survivor and her understanding of how deeply people internalize their beliefs about themselves.