Hanif Abdurraqib

The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Willis-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.

The Crown Ain't Worth Much

-"All of the Black Boys Finally Stopped Packing Switchblades"

Lindsay

that it is just like the nighttime to rename everything that moves into a monster

tells me I make a good Sammy Davis Jr. and I tell him I am supposed to be Buddy Holly, so he laughs and says what’s the difference, and I say a burning plane in an empty field, and a burning cross in front of a house

I am still fascinated by the glint of warm 

light that echoes off the snow and arrives to throw a small blanket 

enough to walk through another harsh winter

-"Dispatches from the Black Barbershop, Tony's Chair. 2011."

god don’t care if you lonely ain’t nobody more lonely than god you know god ain’t got no friends all god got is questions all god got is one million hands lookin for grace ain’t nothing more lonely than watchin everything you built collapse ain’t nothing more lonely than watching a whole block swallowed by smoke nigga ain’t nothing more lonely than having the power to put out a fire and not making it rain

-"At the House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston Was Dead"

but I understand there is a saxophone solo

and I’m pretty sure love has a vacation home there,

and we are all invited tonight when steam rises off of these bodies 

-"While Watching the Convenience Store Burn in Baltimore, Poets on the Internet Argue Another Article Declaring 'Poetry Is Dead'"

are we calling it dead because white people got bored with its living

in this traffic that isn’t moving & hasn’t moved for what feels like thirty years which is to say that it feels like we haven’t moved since we were too small to speak & burden everyone we love with our refusal to crawl back into silence

The Crown Ain't Worth Much quotes

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