Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience—with naming and claiming the “fruits” of Alleyne’s specific journey into womanhood, which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, as well as standing witness in the world that shaped the journey. It is a collection of poems about self-knowledge—of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman. The speaker understands that “maybe older and wiser is just learning / how to put yourself in your own good hands.” The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time—they look back into the speaker’s past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies within consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem “How It Touches Us” comes to realize, “all laws of matter must hold true”. The poems are a movement through fracture—both necessary and unwarranted—toward wholeness and transformation.