Hanif Abdurraqib Reviews Willie Perdomo’s The Crazy Bunch

Hanif Abdurraqib reviews Willie Perdomo’s The Crazy Bunch (Penguin, 2019), which “chronicles a single weekend among friends in East Harlem at the dawn of hip-hop,” for 4Columns. The collection is a “continuation of his interest in the untold histories writhing underneath eras,” writes Abdurraqib. More:

The poems all swell with Perdomo’s natural gift of lyricism, where the language is serving sound first, and the sound serves the overall body of the poem. The poems here dance between vignettes—short sketches of a time and place—and dialogue, in a series throughout the book called “The Poetry Cops,” where police interrogate members of the crew. And even in this dialogue between two voices, there is a beautiful pulse and surprise to the language. To consider the book as a golden-era rap album, these pieces read like the old clips from movies that would pop up right before songs on Wu-Tang albums.

COPS: Nestor, Petey on Friday. Dre on Saturday. That’s a lot of bodies.
PAPO: That was a jackpot, a weekend trifecta, a straight number hit.
COPS: Did Dre ever say anything about suicide?
PAPO: Nigga couldn’t kill himself right, man.

The Crazy Bunch is as much a novel as a collection of poems. A book in the same way that a good album, or even a good song, can be a book, depending on how engaged the speaker is...

Read on at 4Columns.