Publisher Description
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
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“The fast-rising Ohio music journalist’s second book of poems uses pop culture references to animate his corrosively serious, hard-to-forget lines about love, sex, hypocrisy, self-discovery, power, grief, and violence.”
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New York Times Book Review
About Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, author, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His essays and music criticism have been published in the New Yorker and the New York Times. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us, was named a book of the year by BuzzFeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, the Chicago Tribune, and others.