Inner-course: A Plea for Real Love
by Toni Blackman

Toni Blackman is an international champion of hip-hop culture, known for her irresistible, contagious performances and alluring female presence. She’s all heart, all rhythm, all song, all power—a one-woman revolution of poetry and microphone. Like Ntozake Shange, Blackman and her cool, musical poetry and prose weave a magical spell around you, daring you to break her hypnotic hold. Toni’s themes are: the paradoxes of love; the inspirations and hypocrisies of brothers who rhyme; quiet internal wisdom versus the incessant necessity to have her life saved by a DJ. She explodes at the mic and blooms on the page. In the poem “inner-course,” Toni challenges the crass commercial culture of love and guides us into her version of real love: the love of self. In another poem, called “well … ,” she illuminates the pain of a shallow romance in the face of a world tragedy and tries to find meaning in her heartache. In “Getting Open,” a prose piece, Toni teaches us how to free ourselves from fear—hip-hop style. Toni Blackman is your guide into the heart and soul of her creative—and very human—Inner-course.