In his debut essay collection, award-winning poet Jaswinder Bolina meditates on “how race,” as he puts it, “becomes metaphysical”: the cumulative toll of the microaggressions and macro-pressures lurking in the academic market, on the literary circuit, in the dating pool, and on the sidewalks of any given U.S. city. Training a keenly thoughtful lens on questions that are never fully abstract-about immigration and assimilation and class, about the political utility of art, about what it means to belong to a language and a nation that brand you as other-OF COLOR is a bold, expansive, and finally optimistic diagnosis of present-day America.