It's often painful to read, but Jackson weaves these stories together with fluid grace. Under his pen, his mother's plasma donation becomes a treatise on race in America: "Even if donors like Mom are encouraged by a belief that they're supporting the welfare and prosperity of their country, they must contend…with the bewildering dissonance that issues from believing in a republic that in numerous ways has forsaken them." In his final essay, "Revision," Jackson recounts the fates of peers who didn't survive to his age. "I wish I could've seeded him with that faith," Jackson writes of his friend Lil Anthony, murdered outside a strip club at age 20, "that I could've convinced him that pursuing mastery of his gifts may've altered a future that he felt predestined."