"Chinaka Hodge came of age along with hip-hop-and its influence on her suitors became inextricable from their personal interactions. Form blends with content as she examines her love life through the lens of hip-hop's best known orators, characters, archetypes and songs in a finely crafted collection of 25 poems, its length meant to mirror that of a classic double album. Dated Emcees blurs the line between lived and imagined experience, and creates a new and inventive narrative about the music that shaped the craggy heart of a young woman poet, just as it also changed the global landscape of pop"-- |