If you want to blow the dust off of your brain, or your heart, pick up this breathtaking book of poetry.

4.5 stars. I'm feeling breathless after reading this. I don't think any review I give will do justice to these words. one of the most powerful collections, if not the most, I've ever read.

I loved every piece in this collection.

Reads like a eulogy, like music, like a condemnation, like damnation, like a damned nation. This is a stunning collection of trauma transcribed into art, of pain that can be transformed but never erased. It is poetry that sits heavy on the chest, a poetry of open wounds. Reader beware, but reader: read it.

hanif just embodies excellence - as a writer, as a poet, as a human being, as a handler of his personal twitter account. this is poetry with street views, with pop punk boyhood and neighborhood violence, with riffs on blackness, memory, and motif.

I wrote my heart in a poem. it took up the whole bedroom. it doesn't pay rent. it stays up watching cities burn to the ground. I am speechless — there are no words to describe the beautiful, devastating emotion in Abdurraqib's poems.

Abdurraqib was another guest on Bookfight. He, Tom, and Mike read a collection of Lester Bangs music writing. It was the same one that I had read at least a decade ago. I was very excited. Who knew that MTV would re-enter my adult life through a crop of extremely talented young writers focusing on current events, politics, and only occasionally music. In the wake of the ep, I scoured the internet (went to his website) and read as much of Abdurraqib's essays as I could. This led to a knee jerk pu...

This is getting 3 stars not because I enjoyed this collection (I didn't). It gets 3 stars because it's objectively good writing tackling difficult but important subject matter. But for me, this poetry felt really inaccessible and really hard to understand. Maybe it flew over my head but it was so jam packed full of metaphors and twisty wording and concepts that it felt tedious to get through a relatively slim collection. Perhaps I am just not smart enough for this one. And that's ok. Everything

Totally feeling the pain and all the bitterness as well as the good and bad memories of being born as a black in the 1990s.The book has been written as poetry and prose in a short and concise pattern.The main themes include bullying, discrimination and the many things that the author had to face while growing up.I loved the way the book has been written in such a transparent manner. All kinds of emotions just keep pouring out page after page.I just loved how effortlessly every tiniest feel has b...

Whatever i say, i can never do this justice, this was hard, painful, but beautiful and necessary, reading this collection made me wonder, what kind of heart that can contain all this pain and still find the capacity to get it out there in such a delicate yet powerful and magnificent way, it’s a rare thing not only to be able to say how you feel, but also to say it so damn well.This felt like a eulogy to people, places, memories, things that died inside, and things that will, it felt like reading...

Hanif Abdurraqib is so, so great - it's easy (for me, anyway) to get caught up in the music references that the collection is steeped in at first (Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, ATCQ, Elliot Smith, Drake, Pete Wentz, Jay-Z, the gloriousness of opening the contents page and finding poems titled 'Dudes, We Did Not Go Through the Hassle of Getting These Fake IDs for this Jukebox to Not Have Any Springsteen' and 'Ode to Kanye West in Two Parts, Ending in a Chain of Mothers Rising from the River'), an...

Every single poem of this collection punches with some sort of power: recognition, nostalgia, grief, empathy, anger. I loved every piece in this collection.

Bear with me, I am not a frequent reader of poetry so I have a hard time reviewing it when I do. This was a powerful, intense collection with a poignancy that makes you sit up and take notice, Abdurraqib plays a lot with form here, which I loved -- I know that there aren't hard rules to poetry but, as I said, I'm not a big reader of poems so I'm always surprised when they don't always look like the classics one had to read in high school. I particularly loved the stream of consciousness ones, es...

not sure if this was a slog to get through because i’m in a reading slump, because of the collection’s length, its dark subject matter, or just the fact that i’m entering week two of a very groggy flu, but—! i digress! i enjoyed this less than vintage sadness, which was the perfect length to leave me wanting more, and consistently gut-wrenching. the crown ain’t worth much drags slightly in places, but is nonetheless devastatingly gorgeous, because this is hanif we’re talking about. this is more

Here for every pop punk reference. But also we have to keep poetry in our souls otherwise we might die

I am drawn to the utterly honest voice in these poems, and the pop culture references, including music, and the prominent deaths of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland. I would love to hear this poet read his work. Favorite poems are:-1995. After the Streetlights Drink Whatever Darkness Is Left (no basketballs for Xmas in order to save the Black boys from danger on the court)-All of the Black Boys Finally Stopped Packing Switchblades (the reality of the frequency of Black b...

Just about destroyed me.

I am going to read everything Abdurraqib has ever published and I’m gonna cry through it all and it’s going to be the best plan I’ve had all year!!!!

Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite thinkers. He writes the way I want to write. Come for the pop punk references. Stay for the gutting.Some Favorites- “When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind of Like Being a Chicago Bulls Fan” (41)- “After the Cameras Leave, In Three Parts” (90)- “The Crown Ain't Worth Much” (93)

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is such a versatile and skilled poet -- he covers a range of tones, topics, and forms here that's truly incredible. I usually speed through poetry collections but this book took me months to read because I had to put it down so frequently to give the pieces space to breathe. The best collection of poems I've read in a long time.