"Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man is a riveting interrogation of two men in relationship. Ronaldo V. Wilson's prose poems are alternately tough and tender probes into the underbelly of their psyches. With audacity and wit reminiscent of the work of Hilton Als, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin, Wilson decodes sociopolitical narratives around race, sexuality, and class. Identity, Wilson seems to say, is only a collection of stories-the ones told about us in battle with the ones we tell ourselves. What we have here is palpable consciousness: a stunning achievement."-- "Claudia Rankine"
An audacious gem. . . . It relies on a placid, though often humorous, descriptive tone and sophisticated narrative framing. On the surface, a plain, almost artless, language belies the complexity and psychological rip current of the brown boy's life.-- "Southern Review"
An exquisite series of meditations about love's undertow.-- "Multicultural Review"
Ronaldo V. Wilson's Narrative is a beautiful and shocking performance. I'm mesmerized by its Cassandra-like candor. The book's episodes, hovering between the erotic and the traumatic, maintain a bruising, philosophical tension. With narrative vigor and lyric ardor, he cuts to the chase.-- "Wayne Koestenbaum"
Ronaldo Wilson writes from deep within the spiraling matrix of race and sexuality. He has a knack for inhabiting the imagination fully, no matter what-the courage to give in to abandon with a rare precision. He is one of the very few younger American poets that I would call visionary. Scary in an exalted sort of way.-- "David Rivard"
This book is fierce, it reads like a white-hot flash. But how is it laid out? Beautifully crafted sections of prose poetry stand before us like panels of a surrealist painting-the real turned inside out in dream knowledge, evoking the progress of a young man, black, gay, his love and hate and sexual need, commingling in the raw power of the body, the fleshly heart exposed.-- "Meena Alexander"