The Crown Ain't Worth Much

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Overview

2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award - Poetry Honorable Mention

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943735235
Publisher:	Button Poetry
Publication date:	05/15/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	514,318
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the editor of Again I Wait For This To Pull Apart, an anthology of poems relating to music, released by Freezeray Press in 2015. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, and The New York Times, and he is currently a columnist at MTV News. He has been nominated for the pushcart prize, and his poem "Hestia" won the 2014 Capital University poetry prize. He is a Callaloo Creative Writ

Editorial Reviews

06/20/2016
In his powerful debut collection, Willis-Abdurraqib uses pop culture and persona as entryways to explore themes such as family, friendship, race, love, and police brutality within the lives of his Midwestern black speakers. The poems prioritize inexhaustible energy and urgency of subject over any delicacies of craft as they leap quickly from image to image and theme to theme. Willis-Abdurraqib possesses a striking gift for merging pop culture with personal narrative: “the story about larry bird goes/ he walked into a locker room that night and asked/ which one of you is playing for second place? to a room full of black players/ and no one made a sound.” The poems’ breathlessness is understandable, though it can be to their detriment, preventing speaker and reader from sharing a common space. Some poems feel afraid of standing in one place for too long, while others, such as an erasure of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband, feel more like drafts than finished poems. Yet when Willis-Abdurraqib meditates on the dangers of being young and black in America, the power of his poetry is undeniable: “When I say that I am growing old/ I mean that I have lived long enough to fear death.” (July)

Publishers Weekly

"To pinpoint a highlight of the book is impossible. Every poem is honed, polished, and presented with utter rawness and defiance."—Portland Book Review

"Willis-Abdurraqib possesses a striking gift for merging pop culture with personal narrative."—Publishers Weekly

"THE CROWN AIN'T WORTH MUCH is not so much a book you read, but one you survive—with Willis-Abdurraqib's compassionate, elegiac lyric gently pushing you forward through heartbreak and violence."—Indiana Review

"Willis-Abdurraqib writes an ode to living, to the making of and the rediscovering of the self, and of home."—Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah, Winter Tangerine

"The poems are raw: some passionate, some distant, some laden with fear. But as a collection, they create a life that's almost as arresting as it is moving."—Kelsey McKinney, Fusion

"Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib's THE CROWN AIN'T WORTH MUCH leaves me contemplating the meanings of soul: communal soul (peep the breadth of cultural shout outs), rhythmic soul (peep the breadth of sound and syntax), and spiritual soul (peep the breadth of compassion). As titles like 'Ode to Drake, Ending with Blood in a Field' and 'At the House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston Was Dead' suggest, Willis-Abdurraqib bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy. The soul of this magnificent book is dynamic, distinguished, and when called for, down and dirty. What a fresh, remarkable debut."—Terrance Hayes

From the Publisher