Contemporary Authors

• The Crown Ain't Worth Much - 2016 Button Poetry, Minneapolis, MN

• Fusion - http://fusion.net/story/327660/hanif-willis-abdurraqib-the-crown-aint-worth-much/

  QUOTED: "A lot of first books of poems, people craft them over decades. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is a collection that was created largely from 2013 to 2015. There’s a little bit of 2012 shit in there, but the work was done in a really short period of time when my life went through almost a decade’s worth of changes. I got married. I moved out of Ohio. I began writing “not poems” for a living."
  "I think the book meets me in a good place, because I will never be as jarred from comfort as I felt while writing this book. Never in my life again. Because I spent all the time before it looking at the world one way and then I was very quickly in a lot of different arenas forced to view the world in a different way."
  "The growing pains are evident in the book. My insecurities are evident. My anxieties are evident. And I’m really proud of that. Once I figured out that I wanted to do this thing that was like good kid, m.A.A.d city-esque. Not a memoir, but a portrait of a child growing up in a changing city into an adult. It was a lot of hard work to recall memories of mine, because I wanted to put some of myself in it."
  "It’s not a non-fiction work. But it was hard for me to recall memories and be honest about them. And go back to Columbus and be honest about the city changing and not being what it once was, and have to reckon with that."

  7/20/16 5:07 PM
  Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s poetry is a crash course in emotional honesty
  By Kelsey McKinney

  Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
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  Even through the phone, you can feel Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s passion. His voice lifts up gently when he tells stories dripping with nostalgia about growing up in Columbus, Ohio. His tone drops as he describes his struggle to be joyful even when life makes that almost impossible for a black man.

  In his debut collection of poetry, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, Willis-Abdurraqib tells the story of a young black boy growing up in a world that doesn’t make space for him. 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.

  Almost none of the poems rhyme, and some of them are written in blocks of text like a paragraph. Near the end of one poem titled “My Wife Says That It’s a Good Thing Humans Don’t Hold Fear,” Willis-Abdurraqib writes:

  “[…]there are
  so many moments like these writhing
  under the skin of black boys
  you would think that we would
  always be full & never hunger for anything
  & yet”

  So much of the beauty of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much lies in how powerful, how beautiful, the words we use every day can be when shaped by the pauses and endings of an artist.

  I chatted with Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib on the phone Tuesday about gentrification, emotional honesty, and how it feels to publish his debut book of poetry.

  Hanif-Black-BorderButton Poetry
  It’s your pub day! How do you feel?

  I feel… okay. A weird thing was that there were a handful of people who had my book before the actual pub date because Amazon is Amazon. So there’s been this really weird gradual buildup, which is good, but also I don’t know.

  I talked to my editor at MTV Jessica Hopper last night and we talked for a while about how the book publication date is not at all like an album release date, which in my head I felt like it was, because I’d never published a book before. It’s been good. I’m home in Columbus because I was at the Alt Press Music Awards last night. To wake up in Columbus at home, where the book was dreamed up and created, largely, has really made it good.

  I loved the inscription to your book: “For the mother who raised me. For the city that raised me when she no longer could.” How did Columbus influence the creation of this book?

  I’m from Columbus, Ohio. I’m from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. It is rapidly gentrifying now, but when I was growing up it was really a community space. I came up in an area that was primarily filled with poor and/or working class black families. It was sandwiched in between two very nice suburbs. It was a weird experience for me understanding wealth and being able to see wealth but not having access to it in my own life. I’m thankful for that because of how it’s helped me maneuver the world. But my mother passed away when I was 13, and I was very close to my mother.

  So I had to learn to maneuver the world independently through a lot of my formative years. That’s not to say my dad wasn’t around, because he was. My dad is also great. But I was so close to my mom that after she passed away it was hard for me to form connections with a lot of people.

  So why are you so glad to be in Columbus for your book’s publication date?

  I think a lot of skills I have as a writer were built largely independently because I kind of shrunk inside myself in this city. It’s still the only city where I feel like I can really be myself, where I don’t have to answer for who I am. People in Columbus don’t give a shit about anything. They love me because I’m from here. They don’t care how many books I sell. They are gonna read it because they love me and they see themselves in it. I’m glad my book released and I woke up in Columbus, because I’m not anxious. I know I’m in a place where people are gonna love it no matter what. I don’t have to answer for reviews or anything else.

  When did you start writing poetry?

  So this is a thing that I think people are always shocked about. I started writing poetry really seriously in 2012. But the thing about that is, I also understood writing on a very real level. People are always like, “You started writing really late to have this accolade or this accolade.” But the truth is I grew up in a house that was very literary. My mother wrote. I read a lot. I was writing music journalism before I wrote poetry.

  But I dedicated myself to it rigorously. I locked myself away and like really studied it. It’s been like an intense labor of love. I would say that I’ve been writing poetry for four years seriously, but I feel like I’ve put eight or 10 years’ worth of work into it.

  This is your first book! Can you tell me about the process of getting it published?

  So it’s weird. It started off as like a weird, small idea. So Button Poetry, who is the press, they have a manuscript competition every year, but the manuscript is mostly for chapbooks, which are smaller books of poems. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much started as a 12-poem idea, and I submitted it to them because they had asked me.

  I came in second. I didn’t win. I got a call from them and they were like, “Hey, everyone here really likes your poems.” And I said, “Great.” And then they said, “But you didn’t win.” And I said, “Well, okay.” And then they said that they hadn’t done a full-length book before, and they wanted my poems to be the first full-length book. That was the start of it, and then it was all work.

  How long did it take you to write the poems in this book?

  A lot of first books of poems, people craft them over decades. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is a collection that was created largely from 2013 to 2015. There’s a little bit of 2012 shit in there, but the work was done in a really short period of time when my life went through almost a decade’s worth of changes. I got married. I moved out of Ohio. I began writing “not poems” for a living. I think the book meets me in a good place, because I will never be as jarred from comfort as I felt while writing this book. Never in my life again. Because I spent all the time before it looking at the world one way and then I was very quickly in a lot of different arenas forced to view the world in a different way.

  The growing pains are evident in the book. My insecurities are evident. My anxieties are evident. And I’m really proud of that. Once I figured out that I wanted to do this thing that was like good kid, m.A.A.d city-esque. Not a memoir, but a portrait of a child growing up in a changing city into an adult. It was a lot of hard work to recall memories of mine, because I wanted to put some of myself in it.
  It’s not a non-fiction work. But it was hard for me to recall memories and be honest about them. And go back to Columbus and be honest about the city changing and not being what it once was, and have to reckon with that.

  by TaboolaPowered
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  Much of your work is laid out on the page in full sentences. How do you define a poem?

  I believe in the prose poem because I think the prose poem is often discredited. What I wanted to do was show people that it is possible to craft really strong, really well-done prose poems. Of course there are poems in the book that have line breaks and that fit into the canon of what poetry is.

  I want this work to be for everyone, and if I want that, I am going to try and meet people where they are at. And also still do it while respecting the craft and the art form. I think a prose poem, if it’s done well, is just as good as any other type of form or any other shape of poem. I want people who don’t read poems to read my poems. I want people who don’t normally read poetry to feel like they have an entry point here. For them to think this block of text is something they can approach.

  Do you put pressure on yourself to do more than just write poems?

  I often joke about Fetty Wap, who I adore. The observation I make is he’s trying to swing for the fences every time. And when he misses it’s awful. I’m not trying to become this popular whatever, but I write the way I speak and I think I have to represent that on the page. I want people to read this poem as I speak. They run on and they’re restless. But that’s how I speak. That gives permission to other writers. Zora Neale Hurston was writing like I spoke, and that made it very possible for me to write.

  I want to redefine the canon and redefine what we imagine as valuable. I think the prose poem is very valuable. I think it makes the book more accessible, more touchable, and more firm.

  I feel like so many of these poems have a sense of generational history to them. Why did you portray the past the way you did in the book?

  I’ve said this a lot over the past week. Nostalgia is very important to me. Columbus is changing rapidly. I come home and I don’t recognize some of the neighborhoods I lived in because the gentrification has taken over. I’ve only been gone two years, and I come back a lot. I come back multiple times a year.

  I can’t point to a park where I used to play basketball because now it’s a Whole Foods or a shopping center. If I took someone there and said, “This is where I used to play basketball, this is where I used to ride bikes. It’s not there now but it used to be.” That person would say, “I can’t see it.” What happens, I think, when we stop being able to see where a person comes from, is we can’t see that person as a whole person. We lose empathy. I portray the past because it’s a place that I will always have my foot firmly planted in. I want you to see where I came from, because I don’t see the world where I came from in the world today.

  So you want your book to kind of function as a written history of place more than of you?

  The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is an expansive thing, I hope it is. Because it’s like a map—it’s a large map of what Columbus was. I did that very intentionally because I needed people to hear these stories and know the names of people I’ve known and the landmarks I knew. I know that if I take someone, they won’t see it. I did like a video interview a couple weeks ago where I took an interviewer to places that were in the book, and I was showing her things like, “Here’s this landmark.” And about halfway through she turned to me and said, “it doesn’t seem like you grew up in a bad neighborhood at all.” And she’s right. Because if you look at the landscape, it’s not the place I grew up.

  People are being not only moved out of places that they’ve owned for years and loved for years, but they are also being thrown into areas they cannot possibly afford. We think about gentrification as a very one-note thing: that low-income housing project is becoming a shopping mall. But there’s a human cost and there’s a memory cost. People feel dehumanized, and they can’t afford to live where they’ve lived forever. And there’s a generational memory lost. You can’t take your children to where you were a child. I want to archive. The past is important to me because I have to archive my childhood, because I run the risk of my childhood not being believed and then I run the risk of people not being empathetic for where I came from because they can’t see it.

  This book has so much emotion in it. It’s very exploratory about how people feel and how that makes them behave, which isn’t something male authors often take the time to do. Why did you feel that kind of exploration was important?

  The short answer is I just have a lot of feelings. I am really big on emotional honesty because I think for so long I did not have an outlet for that. My mother was an outlet for that. I also believe in not burdening the people I love. Oftentimes I think that as men, I do it, I think we tend to burden particularly the women in our lives. Really, a single woman in our life, and then the rest of the world never sees it. I’m sure I still do that from time to time.

  But I think part of my hopeful evolution as a less shitty person is like being emotionally honest in a way that is really difficult and writing fully dimensional people. In my book there’s a suite of poems that have to do with my barber. And he is like the most masculine person I know. He’s a real person. That narrative strand is real. He’s from the streets. But I also wanted to be really clear that this is a man with fears and emotions and he loves his son. He’s afraid for his partner. I can’t leave these things unspoken. I can’t leave emotional honesty off the page because I don’t want to leave it out of my life. Those too things were in concert, I think.

  So it’s more than just emotion. It’s empathy?

  That’s not to say that I’m always just weeping. But I don’t ever want to be someone who takes away permission from someone to talk about their feelings. I am very literally emotionally wrecked by the world right now that we are living in. I look at like deaths of unarmed black men. I look at people I love, people who are trans, people who are being erased. Their rights are being erased. Their humanity is being erased. This is all my way of saying I hear you, and I am hurting for you and I will be better for you. That’s something I’m always processing.

  How do you continue to create art in the wake of tragedy and injustice? Do you?

  I’m writing poems right now but they’re not necessarily about death. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much was a very specific project with a very specific narrative. And I felt some guilt about the fact that it’s coming out now in the midst of all this, because it does deal in death and grief. But there is a very specific motif behind it.

  But now I think for myself and for the world, I think writing about surviving through a lens of joy is really important and really vital. Writing about what keeps me here, and what keeps me wanting to stay here despite everything. I can’t tell other people what to write. But as a black contemporary writer, who sometimes people look to to write words on a thing, I think the best service I can do right now is offer words on the other thing.

  So people are like, “I’m looking for your words on coping with black death.” And I’m like, “Okay, here are some words on how I am expressing black joy.” Here’s a picture of my dog. That’s the joke I always say because when shit is popping off I often take a picture of my dog because my dog is adorable. That’s how I approach the writing. If I wanna write something joyful, I take out a picture of the dog.

  What are you spending your time doing now?

  I’m working on a second book of poems because I think it just doesn’t stop. I thought after you finish your first book, it gets published immediately. But The Crown Ain’t Worth Much has been finished for months. I’m working on a second group of poems that are based around the night that Biggie died. It’s this weird kind of biblical fan-fiction. A lot of it is about joy and dancing, sweating and holding a child and hugging someone and imagining a future in which joy is our default thing. I think the world is absolutely terrible and I have very little hope some days that there is something better. But I need to imagine that something in order to want to stay, and I need to write that something better into the world.

  Hanif Willis-Abdurraquib’s debut collection of poetry The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is out now. You can buy it from Button Poetry and on Amazon.

• Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib Home Page - http://www.abdurraqib.com/bio/

  HI. I'M HANIF. I WRITE POEMS. I WRITE THINGS ABOUT MUSIC. I AM PROBABLY EATING FRENCH FRIES.
  Photo by Laura Willis-Abdurraqib
  Photo by Laura Willis-Abdurraqib
  BIO

  "Hanif Abdurraqib is everyone's favorite poet right now"
  - William Evans, author of lowercase boy
  "Hey, I was pretty drunk most of the time you were reading. But I think I liked the last one."
  - Some guy in Chicago
  Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism has been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, and The New York Times. He has been nominated for the pushcart prize, and his poem "Hestia" won the 2014 Capital University poetry prize. His first full length collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, is forthcoming in 2016 from Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, an interviewer at Union Station Magazine, and a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine. He is a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing.

  Additionally, he is a columnist at MTV News, where he writes about music, and fights to get Room Raiders back on the air. He thinks poems can change the world, but really wants to talk to you about music, sports, and sneakers.

• Hazlitt - http://hazlitt.net/feature/brief-bright-collection-hours-interview-hanif-willis-abdurraqib

  QUOTED: "In The Wire one of the characters says: “The crown ain’t worth much if the nigga wearing it always getting his shit took.” I thought about it, and thought about what themes the book had rattling around it, like themes about displacement and gentrification, and the claiming of space—people having things taken from them that they held close."
  "I have an understanding of death that won’t allow me to be complacent and not give all of myself to the people I love and care about while we’re all still present. And I think that’s a real gift, and I think part of my writing about that in the book is not necessarily to bum people out, though I’m sure it happens occasionally, but to kind of say: I lived through this, and through that living I found an incredible clarity. I found this joy about understanding that I have limited time here."

  ‘This Brief, Bright Collection of Hours’: An Interview with Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
  BY JULIA COOPER
  The poet and MTV columnist on witnessing, mapping grief and joy, and The Wire.
  Related Books

  Interview
  JANUARY 10, 2017

  Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a punk rock bard from Columbus, Ohio (the east side, he specifies), who writes full-lung prose poems, reduxes of the classical ode, and updates and riffs on Frank O’Hara and Virginia Woolf. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is his confident, vulnerable, slim but feisty debut. A columnist for MTV News, his interest in pop culture knits the collection together, with epigraphs as wide-ranging as Josephine Baker, Whitney Houston, Pete Wentz, and a CNN transcript of an interview between Nancy Grace and the parents of Michael Brown. I thought the collection’s title was a nod to the James Baldwin’s line: “your crown has been bought and paid for. All you must do is put it on,” but I stood corrected.

  I spoke with Willis-Abdurraqib before the 2016 presidential election. In the dank fog of an America awaiting its next president-elect and parting with its first African American one, Willis-Abdurraqib’s collection has taken on a different insistence, and our conversation now feels tinged with something of the prophetic. In the hollow hours following the election results, he wrote “The Day After The Election I Did Not Go Outside.” The poem is peppered with ampersands—little swirling punctuation marks insisting on kinship, on affinity, on introspection when the world feels full of thoughtlessness. As an antidote to the murky times ahead, the poems of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much can be held in the palm of your hand like a string of prayer beads, taut in protest but with an unrelenting tenderness. Reading Willis-Abdurraqib is a balm, and, if ever the act of reading was in the service of self-care, I believe it is here and it is now.

  Julia Cooper: You write for MTV as a columnist. Do you find it hard to jump between registers? Poets have traditionally been working men and women, because poetry doesn’t necessarily pay the bills, but do you find it hard to switch between the two forms?

  Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib: Not really, I think a part of that is that MTV is so great at letting me write the way that I write, so they’re not trying to make me into a different writer than I am. In my prose and in my long form work I use poetic elements just because that’s the way I write, and they don’t try to strip that down.

  Some of the poems in this collection feel like they had been brewing in your mind for a while. Was that the case? What’s your process like?

  A lot of my writing process takes place in my head before it ever gets on paper. I think that I am someone who attempts to be thoughtful, but a lot of my thoughtfulness is driven by anxiety about my ideas and my ability to execute those ideas. If it feels like some of the poems had been brewing for a while, that’s the case entirely. I wait to commit things to paper. I know a lot of poets and writers are into running into the writing and then sorting it out later when everything is on the page, and I think that’s really admirable, but I don’t have the emotional capability or the confidence to do that outright. I need to take fully formed concepts, narratives, and ideas to the page, and that takes a lot of internal brewing.

  Is the title a reference to Baldwin?

  No, the title is a reference to The Wire, which is not Baldwin, but could be. I like The Wire a lot, and I was struggling for a book title really early on. The working title for the first draft of it was called The Greatest Generation, because I did not know there was a book already, like a huge book, like Tom Brokaw wrote it or something. I love the band The Wonder Years and they have an album called The Greatest Generation, and I thought this book spoke to that album a lot. And I was passing my book around and people would come back to me and say, “You can’t call your book this because there’s a really famous book called this,” and it came out in 2012 or something. And I was like, Well, shit.

  So in The Wire one of the characters says: “The crown ain’t worth much if the nigga wearing it always getting his shit took.” I thought about it, and thought about what themes the book had rattling around it, like themes about displacement and gentrification, and the claiming of space— people having things taken from them that they held close.

  I’m wondering, who else should I be reading? Who are some other young or lesser-known poets who you think deserve some due?

  Nate Marshall is a poet from Chicago who I don’t think I could have finished this book without. I think his work is stunning and important and talks about place and home in a way that’s really great. Ariana Brown is a poet from Boston who is gifted. And I think Morgan Parker is really important; she’s right at the edge in pop culture and race and what it means to be a black woman in America in a way that’s stunning and brilliant.

  I read that you look for poetry that deals in “the art of witnessing.” Do you think witnessing is always painful?

  No, I don’t think so. I think that a big thing I’m trying to do now, especially with The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, is dealing with something that is really rooted in joy. I think the things that are most accessible to us are pain and grief, or fear. Like we can watch—we’re in a time where we can watch someone be murdered on a social media feed. While that is witnessing, witnessing is also sitting on a rooftop after a really good, long hard day and watching the sun go down. Or witnessing someone you love excel at something. I want to invest in that a little more, because I think once I detach myself from the pain of what I have witnessed, I need to find something to replenish myself. And I think finding joy to both witness and write about is really important.

  I like this idea of investing in joy. I like that image. I was reading that you don’t have any formal training in poetry, which surprised me, but led me to wonder, is your love of music and therefore rhythm and cadence, is that what drew you to write poetry instead of prose?

  I think so, yeah. The thing is—whenever I talk about how a lot of my peers have MFAs and really intense formal training, that is—I always wrote. I think often times, the narrative around the book is, “Oh, he didn’t go to school for poetry, so he just like stumbled into this, that’s wild.” But I wrote, I was writing music journalism, and I wrote in a very intense way that drew me close to language and the way words moved. Though poetry wasn’t natural, it was a reachable, touchable thing for me that I knew I could access and play out into something greater.

  I was wondering if you found it hard to write publicly about some of your most intimate losses. Making yourself vulnerable—were you were worried about that? Was it cathartic?

  It was hard, but I think not nearly as hard as grief without an outlet, grief with no map out of it. For me, although the poets I love write about sadness, their own sadness, very bluntly, they find a way to reckon with it and come out on the other side a lot cleaner, and happier, and freer. I think grief is work, in the same way that I think speaking about joy and trying to find joy is work. Grief sits on our bodies and works on us. And we don’t have to seek it out, it’s just there. So for me, the work of whittling it down is worthwhile. The work of writing about it, chipping away at it, and putting it out into the world where people can read it, and it can hopefully help people chip away at their own—I think that’s vital and important.

  It was replenishing to read someone else’s grief so bluntly on the page.

  I don’t want to talk about death all the time, I don’t want to revel in death, but at the same time, I’ve witnessed and suffered through a lot of deaths at a young age. What that did for me was make it real. It made death something that I understand as an inevitability, and it makes this brief, bright collection of hours that I have while living something that I am so thrilled about. Which doesn’t mean that I’m never unhappy because I’m so happy to be alive, but I have an understanding of death that won’t allow me to waste my time. I have an understanding of death that won’t allow me to be complacent and not give all of myself to the people I love and care about while we’re all still present. And I think that’s a real gift, and I think part of my writing about that in the book is not necessarily to bum people out, though I’m sure it happens occasionally, but to kind of say: I lived through this, and through that living I found an incredible clarity. I found this joy about understanding that I have limited time here, and I’m lucky that I have people who would miss me if I were not here anymore. I think the book is partly about that, about how I am trying to be better at loving and living and fighting for the things I believe in while I’m still present.

QUOTED: "When Willis-Abdurraqib meditates on the dangers of being young and black in America, the power of his poetry is undeniable."

The Crown Ain't Worth Much
Publishers Weekly. 263.25 (June 20, 2016): p131.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
The Crown Ain't Worth Much

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib. Button (SPD, dist.), $16 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-94373504-4

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/1 mean that I have lived long enough to fear death." July)

• Indiana Review
  https://indianareview.org/tag/the-crown-aint-worth-much/
  Word count: 1480

  QUOTED: "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."
  "Readers quibbling over line breaks are missing the point. There is something much more powerful carrying these poems than you will find in most contemporary US poetry.

  MICROREVIEW: HANIF WILLIS-ABDURRAQIB’S THE CROWN AIN’T WORTH MUCH
  The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib (Button Poetry, 2016)

  I don’t want to imagine how many strangled nights Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib spent thrashing inside the belly of death to give us The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, but I am immensely grateful he survived them with a soul as expansive and rich as found in this debut collection of poetry. This collection carries a fierce duende, a juggernaut unafraid to tie your body “to a truck in east texas” and drag it “through that jagged metal holy land so you can meet god clean”. 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.

  Throughout the collection, Willis-Abdurraqib chronicles the speaker’s coming-of-age and intimate relationship with death through a narration of his summers—the season of block parties and drive-bys, basketball games and police brutality. The book is broken up into four sections. The first roughly sketches out the author’s adolescence, including the death of his mother and young black folk in his community. The second section takes this battle into his early adulthood and college years, where old and new ghosts follow a speaker unable to run away from his traumas. The wounds from these traumas never leave, but rather, are constantly reopened as the author is forced to relive his life’s cruelest moments with every act of aggression, with every subsequent death, whether or not it received the attention of popular media.

  Each poem carries an urgency that might stagger a less resilient reader. For those who need a breather between heavier poems, this book may take a while to get through. In “On Duende & Death Culture,” Christopher Soto AKA Loma describes how writers with close proximity to a culture of death (its relentless pain and desperate frame of mind) produce poems that are “visceral, vital, dying as you produce them.” For these writers, survival supersedes deeper meditation and the mastery of craft. Most these poets are not afforded the privilege of reaching maturity, where the urgency of their poems is reinforced by form. If given the chance, I imagine most these writers would produce work like Willis-Abdurraqib’s. The prose poems in his collection work in conjunction with the content to propel you across image and language like a brick thrown through glass. The frequency of the prose poem might make the skeptical reader hesitant to commit to this book, as it potentially suggests a lack of formal mastery or understanding of how poems work on the page, as opposed to aloud. Willis-Abdurraqib himself acknowledges his past discomfort with line breaks in his interview with Kristin Maffei in Late Night Library. Fortunately, Willis-Abdurraqib exerts a masterful control over the authority and lyricism of his prose poems, akin to the spirit and energy found in matured poets, such as Sean Thomas Dougherty. For example, read an excerpt of “While Watching The Convenience Store Burn in Baltimore, Poets on the Internet Argue Over Another Article Declaring ‘Poetry Is Dead,'” a poem I selfishly (and incorrectly wish would’ve came earlier in the collection for the way it sets the tone for conversations about Williw-Abdurraqib’s work:

  I mean is it really dead did we watch its mother pull its limp husk from the mouth of a night that it walked into living are there one hundred black hands carrying its casket through the boulevard did it die in a city that no one could find until fire drank from the walls of its abandoned homes did broken glass rain onto the streets in its memory did people weep at the shatter did people cry for the convenience store and forget the corpse did the reek of rising gas drain the white from a child’s eyes did we stop speaking its dead name when a fist was thrown do we even remember what killed it anymore I think it was split at its spine but I can’t recall I just woke up one day with this new empty can we uproot the body and drag it through the streets will people love it again if we lay it at the boots of those who last saw it alive are we calling it dead because white men got bored with its living (1-11)

  With this poem, Willis-Abdurraqib makes his position clear: he’s not here for pretentious conversations about white space and form. Readers quibbling over line breaks are missing the point. There is something much more powerful carrying these poems than you will find in most contemporary US poetry.

  The third section of the collection centers around loneliness. Loneliness is a theme present throughout the entire collection but it finds its first serious challenge here. It would be ironic, but not incorrect, to call this a communal loneliness, a struggle to love in the face of the incessant losses suffered by the author and his communities. The dead form a fundamental part in these communities, and their presence and influence is felt despite their absence. In the throes of this loneliness, the community provides the author perspective and comfort, whether it be through the blunt words of the local barber or the through the lessons provided by the ghost of the author’s mother. This strong sense of community is apparent in the collection through its cultural breadth, engaging with imagery and motifs from hip-hop to barbershops to sports to punk. Even on a literal level, Willis-Abdurraqib’s commitment is clear. In the acknowledgments, he gives shout outs to his communities, including the Columbus, Ohio poetry scene, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the names of Xavier Smith and Fayce Hammond, two promising Columbus writers yet to receive many accolades, who are in the nascent stages of their literary careers. Their inclusion in the shout-outs shows a rare attention to community for an author as accomplished as Willis-Abdurraqib.

  In the fourth and final section, Willis-Abdurraqib emerges to confront the death found throughout the collection with authority and wisdom of someone who has survived countless summers. Here, Willis-Abdurraqib’s voice feels most contained, as if the support and love the author has found has given him the power to reconcile himself with the ubiquity of death. This power blesses us with moments of pure magic, as in “After the Cameras Leave, in Three Parts,” where a piece of glass shattered during the Baltimore protests can tell us “people have to mourn the shatter/ of anything that they can / look into / and see how alive / they still are” (12-14). I’m amazed by the way Willis-Abdurraqib can poignantly encapsulate the grief and joy found in survival, a reminder of the responsibility we have to live life well, if only for the friends and family who would have so eagerly lived it had their lives not been taken from them by the violence of poverty and racism in its thousand incarnations. As a first-generation Salvadoran American processing another generation of massacres, another generation of gunfire slaughtering my motherland, I felt a deep resonance between Central American and Black struggles, two communities so racked by the twin terrors of police and gang violence. This book ripped my heart out and gave it back to me stronger, more formidable in the fight for our joys.

  I’ll finish off this review with some lines from “I Mean Maybe None Of Us Are Actually From Anywhere,” one of the strongest poems in the collection, for those who can’t relate to the content of this review or are unwilling to put themselves through the work of understanding what Black life means in America today:

  I began running when the fire started and I haven’t stopped
  since maybe I come from running maybe running is a
  country maybe everyone who lives there misses someone
  they thought would live forever

  I’m glad you don’t know how to find it I’m glad
  that you haven’t caught me yet I’m glad you have a
  black friend I’m sorry
  that your black friend may die soon
  and then there will be only me (29-37)

  JULY 08, 2016 BY WILLY PALOMO

• Blue Shift Journal
  https://www.theblueshiftjournal.com/single-post/2016/09/16/Review-of-The-Crown-Aint-Worth-Much-by-Hanif-Willis-Abdurraqib
  Word count: 853

  QUOTED: "There are many things to be said about the début collection of Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much: intimate; haunting; an experiment in lyricality, rife with beauty imagery and stunning turns of language. However, perhaps the most striking aspect of the work is its complexity. Each piece is a world unto itself, and yet, each piece is simultaneously a quiet unspooling."

  Review of The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
  September 15, 2016
  by brianna albers, reviews editor

  And isn’t this how each story starts? With a list of things we know we cannot take back? And, still. Everything has an end. This is where I tell you what I most want to hear myself: none of it was real.
  – Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, “The Story of the Last Punk Rock Show Before the City Tore Down Little Brother’s,” The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

  There are many things to be said about the début collection of Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much: intimate; haunting; an experiment in lyricality, rife with beauty imagery and stunning turns of language. However, perhaps the most striking aspect of the work is its complexity. Each piece is a world unto itself, and yet, each piece is simultaneously a quiet unspooling. In the end, readers are left with what remains – a story of loss, grief, and the sites at which the two intersect.

  Willis-Abdurraqib guides us through a menagerie of narratives – warped by memory, and reflected by time itself. We give witness to the author’s social life, and the aggressions – both micro and macro – undergone. We give witness to a community, blistering beneath the weight of a gasping city. We give witness to a fall of seasons, softened by nostalgia, but given urgency through the act of recollection and remembrance. In this, we are not just readers; we are participants. We are entrusted with something timeless, desperate, and human.

  In the series of pieces entitled “Dispatches from the Black Barbershop, Tony’s Chair. …,” readers are introduced to a barber, narrating the landscape of an urban neighborhood; in this, Willis-Abdurraqib discusses the violence of a cityscape, and how that violence manifests itself via communal grief. The barber gives several monologues throughout the work, combining the monotony of everyday life with the rippling undercurrent of sociocultural tension: “they got a fancy ice cream shop where the corner store was they got a sports bar where the record store was and what we supposed to do for records where we supposed to go for that old school shit how we supposed to heal ….” The barber also mentions the overarching prevalence of death: “the blood ain’t stop for like four hours the blood was everywhere the blood was a river the blood ran on to the street was like that shit had legs ….” In both cases, Willis-Abdurraqib navigates the topics with honesty and a sense of wizened grace.

  Readers are also introduced to the author’s mother, in conversation with the author’s wife. This is a particularly strange site – a meeting of the past and present; evidence of the author’s attempt to grieve and move on, all in the space of the same breath. “I wish I could fix this for you,” the mother says. “I’m sorry none of my children wear suits anymore. I wish ties didn’t remind my boys of shovels, and dirt, and an empty living room. They all used to look so nice in ties.” Thus, we see the author acknowledge his process of grief, and how that process has affected – and will continue to affect – his interpersonal relationships. Again, we are given a taste of loss as it is embodied in Willis-Abdurraqib’s work: heavy with cultural significance, and never in isolation.

  Ultimately, though, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is a story of movement. Willis-Abdurraqib gives form and voice to his grief, and yet, refuses to turn his loss into something sedimentary. Rather, Willis-Abdurraqib speaks to healing. In “The Story of the Last Punk Rock Show Before the City Tore Down Little Brother’s,” Willis-Abdurraqib writes:

  “I do not tell him that I know death. I do not tell him that I have crawled into that hollow mouth and exited through the other side. I do not tell him that death is not when a city makes a strip mall out of where you bled once. That is the other death. The one that wears your name, but does not ask you to wear its own. The nostalgia is killing me again.”

  Here, the desolation of a life; the way loss can stain a landscape, razing it to the ground. Grief is blinding. All-consuming. But, as with all things, grief – death – is surmountable. Something to move through, and on from. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, then, is a testament to that journey. There is no denial of pain. In truth, there is only this: survival, in its gutted, bloody form.

• Portland Book Review
  http://portlandbookreview.com/2016/07/the-crown-aint-worth-much/
  Word count: 1055

  QUOTED: "The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is not a scream nor is it soft spoken; it’s simply poetry at its finest, and only a fool would deny how much that is worth."

  The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
  by Julia Gaskill on July 5, 2016
  7
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  Publisher: Button Poetry
  Formats: Paperback
  Purchase: Amazon
  There’s become a somewhat popular trend in recent years wherein a person will, completely out of the blue, pose the question: Is poetry dead? It’s presented by people claiming to play devil’s advocate, who just so happen to hold the opinion that the so called “poetry” being written nowadays is too loud, clunky, and angry. The laughter behind their asking, “Is poetry dead?” is always detectable. It doesn’t matter if others agree or not, they themselves have already made it clear they consider the art form deceased because of their personal opinions of the ever growing popularity of slam poetry and spoken word.

  This question, in and of itself, is boring, inane, and obviously not true.

  There is so much important poetry being crafted by talented writers nowadays. Does it sound like the Shakespeare’s, Whitman’s, Poe’s, or Blake’s of yesteryear? Clearly not. Poetry – much like everything else – is a growing, thriving art form, and it only makes sense that the style would evolve over time. We’ve embraced this with cinema, novels, television, and radio – so why not poetry?

  With poetry in this day and age, one of the great things that readers (and viewers) are exposed to is all of the varying voices. Poetry presented in classroom settings is usually written by dead, white men talking about nature, women, death, flowers, or religion. While it’s perfectly acceptable that these long dead poets wrote pieces that are still fawned over to this day, it’s worth asking if their poetry should even be considered important in the twenty-first century?

  We are seeing a range of new poets speak about actual important topics. Black Lives Matter. Feminism. Sexism. Racism. Abuse. Trauma. Body positivity. Depression. Sexuality. Misogyny. Queer issues. Chronic illness. Transgender and Nonbinary matters. Grief. Mental illness. Say what you will about the spoken word scene, but this art form is clearly shining a light on topics that need be addressed, and doing so in a beautifully crafted, raging wild form that poetry has taken on.

  Enter Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib. Anyone who claims poetry is dead has obviously never encountered this man’s body of work.

  Abdurraqib’s The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is his first published book of poetry – though he’s been published online many times, featured in plenty of spoken word videos on YouTube, and has competed in nationwide poetry competitions. It is an understatement to claim that he is simply good at his craft; poetry flows from Abdurraquib in a meticulous, wonderful way that is not often seen. Every ampersand is perfect; every line break and indent knows its place. To understand how far poetry has come since the simple days of the sonnet, one need look no further than this beautiful book of poems.

  The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (title taken from the popular TV show, The Wire) focuses heavily on Abdurraqib’s youth with a setting in Columbus, Ohio. The poems focus heavily on gentrification and racism, and what it’s like to grow up black in America. The poet does not shy away from the violence faced by himself and others and the incidents he’s gone through over the years. He also speaks of personal matters, such as the death of his mother, depression, relationships and marriage, his home city, and the affinity he had for the punk scene growing up. Along with poems on punk, there’s also a consistent theme of music tied into his work, bearing mentions to such artists as Whitney Housten, Drake, Bruce Springsteen, Kanye West, Pete Wentz, and others. The poet parallels the music in comparison to his own experiences and talks about the effects the artists’ work and lives have held over his.

  To pinpoint a highlight of the book is impossible. Every poem is honed, polished, and presented with utter rawness and defiance. Lines such as “that it is / just like the nighttime / to rename everything that moves / into a monster?” and “I do not say noose when I mean bullet / I do not say bullet when I am asked what keeps me awake at night / I do not keep track of the names / I do not keep track of my own body” embrace every page with clarity, insight, and tenacity. Abdurraqib’s words are not a tempest or a flood; he simply cracks his heart open and offers it to the readers. It’s the audience’s duty to tread lightly and accept all that he has to give, and what a heart wrenching, eye opening gift it is.

  If any doubt still lingers, search his work on the Internet. The poet has written for MTV, Pitchfork, The New York Times and many more critically acclaimed sites. Better yet, find his poetry; watch his poetry. Pieces featured in the Abdurraqib’s book, like “The Crown Ain’t Worth Much,” “The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up,” and “Maybe None Of Us Are Actually From Anywhere,” can be found on YouTube, along with a slew of his other work. Seriously, if potential readers or poetry aficionados have a moment to spare, this reviewer implores that these videos be not only watched, but devoured.

  To call poetry a dead art form is a falsehood. People actually paying attention know this from the immense amount of amazing poetry being presented today, and Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is up there with the best of the best. His experiences are raw and real; he shines a light on all that he’s faced and does so in a gorgeous, poetic fashion. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is not a scream nor is it soft spoken; it’s simply poetry at its finest, and only a fool would deny how much that is worth.

  5/5 stars