[Even though the content of Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet] is contemporary, it is written from a personal as well as a personalist view. Personal, meaning interpreting perceptions from the framework of one's own experience, primarily, and subjecting them to a formal ideology only as a secondary consequence. Personalist, meaning that the ultimate value of any act or movement is directly proportional to one's own self-actualization and its negative or positive effect on interpersonal relationships….

In the first part of the book, Nikki talks with warmth and humor about her family….

"Don't Have a Baby Till You Read This" is one of the best of this group of good autobiographical essays. It is the most humorous and most serious…. (p. 51)

The second half of the book moves away from the autobiographical to general commentary. The personalist comes full...