"In his debut essay collection, award-winning poet Jaswinder Bolina dissects 'how race, ' as he puts it, 'becomes metaphysical': the cumulative toll of the microaggressions and macro-pressures lurking in the academic market, on the literary circuit, in the dating pool, and on the sidewalks of any given U.S. city. Training a keenly thoughtful lens on questions about immigration and assimilation and class, about the political utility of art, and about what it means to belong to a language and a nation that brand you as other, Of Color is a bold, expansive, and finally optimistic diagnosis of present-day America"--