“This book is an open book. There is no lying in it, no sleep in reading it, no hiding from the person or the place it comes from. The poems are deeply steeped in the African American experience and a tradition I would trace to Langston Hughes and Washington, D.C. where buses are good places for poets. You can write on your lap, read an open book and listen to beautiful conversations. This is what reading Trouble Sleeping is like to me. You get somewhere.”

Fanny Howe, Judge of the 2014 New Issues Poetry Book Prize