"In pages of what read, to me, like film stills of a throat in song, the prose-throat pulsates into line then sentence again. A pulsation of lyric, memory, research. Simmonds stretches the ink into a 'tangible Black continuum of sound, ' a simultaneously autobiographical and biographical text that radiates with relationship. A twelve-year-old Black, gay boy encounters Leontyne Price for the first time: 'I discovered in her whirling howl my human noise / my instrument eye [.]' Just part of Simmonds' genius is his ability to write a work so sensuous with attention even as it is terrorized by ever-looming racial and homophobic violences. This book is a lucid, extraordinary history of a voice, and 'the clearing it makes / to be unhidden . . .'" --Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria

"The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse may well prove to be the ultimate hybrid: a monster of a book, to be read and reread, not in parts but whole, attending and attentive to the body of its 'dark molasses sound.'" --Brenda Marie Osbey, World Literature Today