"The latest from one of my favorite poets, and one of the best poem-titlers of all time (seriously, check out the table of contents). "The poem begins with pain as a mirror / inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me / before my first funeral & so the poem begins / with old grief again at my neck"
I'm so sorry Adburraqib had to suffer so much heartbreak to write this book, but I am simultaneously so thankful on behalf of all the broken hearts who will find comfort in these pages:
"I tell my therapist / you can't spell / heartbreak without art / and she doesn't laugh / but it's true look / at how I whip my arms / in the empty apartment again / to the song / from the movie / where someone walked back / through the door / they once walked out of""
Publisher Tin House Books
Publication Date 2019
Section New Titles - Paperback / Poetry / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Archived Staff Suggestions / Kaleigh O.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781947793439
“When an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry.” —Booklist, Starred Review
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew.
It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
