Hanif Abdurraqib

cantfindit

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

How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This

dear reader, with our heels digging into the good

mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something

about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself

but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown

& lord knows I have been called by what I look like

more than I have been called by what I actually am &

I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this

exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning

something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything

worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive

to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather

clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent

heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning,

you could scatter his whole mind across a field.

 

 

Published:

2018

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Identity

Nature

Poetic Form

Literary Devices:

Epistolary

(of a literary work) in the form of letters

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”