Hanif Abdurraqib's Work Discussed at Guernica

Jay Deshpande writes about a few of the themes that unite Abdurraqib's poetry and criticism in an article recently published at Guernica. "Although the line between his art and his writing about art is not always stark," writes Deshpande, "all his work comes from an evident place of love." Picking up there: 

This may be a matter of origins: as a self-described “scene kid” who grew up at punk shows in the Midwest and became a capacious music nerd at a young age, Abdurraqib knows how to bond with a reader over the track he can’t get over, the underappreciated minor band. It is his ranging affections, his unfettered (yet still critical) enthusiasms that we come for. And clearly he loves many things. In 2016 The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, his first book of poems, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. The next year saw They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, a compendium of his music writing and personal essays, which made more than a dozen Best-of-the-Year lists. In 2019, he doubled up. The biography Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest was published in February, and his second poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster, came out last fall, right as Go Ahead in the Rain made the longlist for the National Book Award. (It has since been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.) His next two books are under contract with Random House; the first, a history of blackface, will be published later this year.

Read on at Guernica.