Abstract: This article examines how two poets, Tracie Morris and Harryette Mullen, reimagine Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons through their own innovative poetic practices. Both poets talk back to Stein, exposing the racial and gender dynamics embedded in her work. Mullen’s adaptations, Trimmings (1991) and SPeRM*KT (1992), explore how Stein’s elliptical language fractures objects and objectifies people within the context of racialized capitalism. Morris’s handholding: five kinds (2016) further challenges avant-garde assumptions by revisiting Stein’s Tender Buttons with the nonce form of a handholding poem, a critical-creative dialogue that simultaneously critiques and re-envisions Stein's work. I explore how Morris, in particular, builds upon Mullen’s insights to transform the legacy of Stein’s modernist text, revealing the racialized undercurrents that inform her aesthetic principles while also positioning herself as a contemporary capable of remaking Stein’s work. By doing so, Morris demonstrates that reading Stein with double vision — seeing both the original work and the critique layered upon it — transforms not only the text but the act of reading itself.