Microphone Check is Gerald L. Coleman at his best. A defiant homily on privilege, race, and the social contract - his poems are neither timid nor retiring. With his finger on the pulse of the issues that grip our times, this Affrilachian Poet screams in blistering appeal to our human nature for justice. This is not the collection for readers seeking odes concerning flowers and misty summer mornings by the lake. It is poetry for revolutionaries and the conscious. Praise for Microphone Check: In Microphone Check, Gerald L. Coleman checks more than his sound. He checks my privilege, my conscience, my pulse. Coleman is akin to an Old Testament prophet, righteous and fed up, screaming out from the South one last warning to our country: for our sins of sanctioned murder, colonization, and terrorism against our citizens: now is the time to repent. Rebecca Gayle Howell Author of Render/An Apocalypse and American Purgatory Wry, prescient, and uncompromising, Coleman's poetry flows like a portentous crack of thunder rolling over the mountains and low hills of our complacent literary landscape. John Edward Lawson Author of Wholesome Terror: Lawfully Combative Verse Gerald L. Coleman's Microphone Check moves between fierceness and revelry. Here, America is called to task ("your flag waves/ with the crisp snap/ of a coffin cover") and freedom is a hollow path, paved with memory. On the shoulders of poets of the Black Arts Movement, Coleman reclaims blue grass and Southern haints, Affrilachia and telltale history. In this riotous collection, the poet is truthseeker, stardust and alien, an outsider in this America, insistent on meting out love and measuring value by skin. A son playing with fire, in Microphone Check, Coleman is elegiac and ablaze with "blackness/ ...too bright/ to gaze directly into." Remica Bingham-Risher Author of Starlight & Error A microphone check, in hip-hop laymen terms, presents a call to attention, an alarm to heed a message about to be dropped in the heat of battle, or a battle about to begin, a spool of informed and historical knowledge woven through sound and language to a crescendo, releasing an epiphany, which for a moment, instigates silence, and then the proverbial, Oh, no he didn't After reading Microphone Check, by Gerald L. Coleman, the reader will say Oh, yeah he did Coleman unapologetically indicts America, his place of birth, through lyrical landscapes of history, events, circumstances and prejudices, through an aesthetics steeped in the Black Radical Tradition. Exquisitely crafted and razor sharp, these poems penetrate truth, removes silence (because it will not save you), indicts racism, calls out the post-racial wannabees, while keeping it real and 100. Randall Horton Author of Pitch Dark Anarchy & Hook: A Memoir