In a world-context shaped by urgency and insurgency, I want to consider aesthetic temporality and specificity of sentences. What is the invocation of “now” that lives in a poetic line or a prose phrase, and is it distinct from the “now” of insurgency? How does the act—the phenomenon—of reading explicate what we might know of criticism? In these queries, I want to explore some of the conditions of black literary criticism given the state of a disastrous world.