The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib's first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.
Enjoyed this one quite a lot. Some real gut-punch poems here. It's a thematic book where the poems, roughly, follow a young Black man growing up in a midwestern city. I assume it's largely autobiographical.
Also... the cover image is absolutely the best.
and we are only 19 and not yet saddled with the burdens of our parents except for in the middle of some nights, when the loneliness slides itself along our necks like a crucifix and we gasp for anything familiar,
isn’t it funny how art most imitates life when a black body is being drained of it? how easily we can imitate that which is never coming back again to claim its space?
