An incredibly powerful collection of poetry from Clarke, who is an Australian poet of Afro-Caribbean descent. The poems center the reader in Clarke’s world and viewpoint, a place where women and people of color have it hard; even as she paints that world in heartbreaking detail, she colors it with her fierce resolve to fight back, to stand together, to grow strong. The title is actually a line from the poem “something sure,” in which a Black mother sits her son down and tells him to pay attention: she is raising him to be a good man, one who knows “how decent folk behave,” but he needs to know: there are times when other men can be a danger to women, and when those times arise, she needs her son to be the kind of man who will step in, to intervene as only a fellow man can. It’s chilling, heartbreaking, and beautiful.