It's hard to hold / all this desire in one body," and so, to hold her grief, name, and desire, Jamaica Baldwin turns to bone-truth, skin-truth, and song-truth language. She speaks with a tongue cut on the sadness of her mother and father as she writes "I am a product of their curiosity, their vengeance, their need." Baldwin dedicates "A Cento for Black Women Who Died from Cancer" to Gwendolyn, Audre, Lorraine, Lucille, and June - a breathtaking, heartbreaking list, and so in Bone Language, with lines now writhing and now composed, and ever sensual, she builds a house to heal the body of a black woman after cancer. Healed by the words of these poets, Jamaica Baldwin stands with them in the hospital of her own language. She pronounces words of resistance to the curious and vengeful world: "I am not what anyone thinks I am." Bone Language is, indeed, a beautiful, needful thing.

—Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected

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