Poetry. Yusef Komunyakaa calls CALL & RESPONSE a tightly woven tapestry of impulses and life rituals, a tribute to what keeps us whole and true to human complexity. In essence, this wonderful collection is about bridges: between cultures, individuals, genders, parts of oneself, human beings and nature, family, etc. Hamer isn't afraid of those everyday feelings. His best poems are calls into our modern wilderness that demand heartfelt responses: they are challenges to us to connect through the acceptance of our personal and public histories. CALL & RESPONSE unearths myths with such fluidity , we don't realize that we've been transported to a place where we can earn transcendence. Southern, American, universal-the voices cohere into a seamless, symphonic bravo for human endurance. Seldom do we witness such a poetic surety in a first book.