HERE WE LEARN from the ghost of Marvin Gaye, question the ethics of Nikola Tesla, examine the character of God, and drift in lament and wonder.
In these poems by Hanif Abdurraqib, violence appears in different forms. In some lines, it is a fistfight between teenagers in a schoolyard, in others the anti-Blackness of a suburb or the music industry: “[T]he mailman still hands me bills like I should feel lucky to have my name on anything in this town,” Abdurraqib writes.
Thirteen of the 51 poems are titled after a criticism he heard from a white woman at a poetry reading in 2016: “How can black people write about flowers at a time like this?”
“You might tell me something / about the dandelion head & how it is not a flower itself,” one poem reads, “but a plant made up of many 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.”
The collection is divided into three parts: “The Pledge,” “The Turn,” and “The Prestige.” However, the structure can seem a bit chaotic with the 13 identically titled poems interspersed at seemingly random increments. Readers may feel that the structure is a puzzle too daunting.
Though the poems are artfully told, their readers need to keep in mind that they deal with realism. There is a long history of commentators reducing Black art to being solely political, only for protest, or simply ethereal. Any reductionist labels are ultimately dehumanizing. In this collection, there is trauma and there is music. There are bullets and there are flowers.
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