Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif 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 have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he will release the book A Little Devil In America with Random House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School. Source
The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up
all them black
boys in the ‘hood
had they wallets
unearthed in cities
they ain’t never
seen before & they
was all empty
‘cept for maybe the bones
of the last woman
to hold them in her arms &
call them by the
name they blessed the
earth with & all of the horns
on my block crawled back
into they cases & marched to
new mouths & fathers
had nothing to press
their lips to & make sing &
i think this why brandon’s mother
left & what difference is there
in those things which we lose
& those things which decide
to gift us with a kind
of feral silence?
the change that leapt
from our pockets into the cracked
basketball courts & the older brothers
who never found their way back home
Published:
2014
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2023
Themes:
Music & Sports
Literary Devices:
Personification
the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing
Rhetorical Question
a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered