Poetry. African American Studies. Is all black desire corrupt? If American aspiration is linked to the desire to have whiteness, be male and make money, what, now, can a decent person want? Family, death, power, Poetry and blackness--each is implicated in a general failure of perfection and subjected to furious lyric rethinking in Simone White"s work; a poetry of ideas where "the whole limbic system [becomes] an event," "decorous" and profane, precise and bewildered.