The Crown Aint Worth Much by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Crown Aint Worth Much Reviews

• 
  Dana Sweeney

  Reads like a eulogy, like music, like a condemnation, like damnation, like a damned nation. This is a stunning collection of trauma transcribed into art, of pain that can be transformed but never erased. It is poetry that sits heavy on the chest, a poetry of open wounds. Reader beware, but reader: read it.
• 
  James Francisco Tan

  I loved every piece in this collection.
• 
  Reading_ Tamishly

  Totally feeling the pain and all the bitterness as well as the good and bad memories of being born as a black in the 1990s.
  The book has been written as poetry and prose in a short and concise pattern.
  The main themes include bullying, discrimination and the many things that the author had to face while growing up.
  I loved the way the book has been written in such a transparent manner. All kinds of emotions just keep pouring out page after page.
  I just loved how effortlessly every tiniest feel has been expressed in this one.
  One of those books where the author expresses exactly what he wants 👍
  And yes, him being a great music lover and expressing it in this one made me love the book more👍
  I love his expressions on his wedding and his wife😊
  He is just so real👍
  
  *I love the cover so much!!!
• 
  Christine

  If you want to blow the dust off of your brain, or your heart, pick up this breathtaking book of poetry.
• 
  jenni

  hanif just embodies excellence - as a writer, as a poet, as a human being, as a handler of his personal twitter account. this is poetry with street views, with pop punk boyhood and neighborhood violence, with riffs on blackness, memory, and motif.
• 
  Muhammad

  Whatever i say, i can never do this justice, this was hard, painful, but beautiful and necessary, reading this collection made me wonder, what kind of heart that can contain all this pain and still find the capacity to get it out there in such a delicate yet powerful and magnificent way, it’s a rare thing not only to be able to say how you feel, but also to say it so damn well.
  
  This felt like a eulogy to people, places, memories, things that died inside, and things that will, it felt like reading your best friend’s diary that you wish you never read.
  
  No matter what kind of life you lived or where, you would still find those pieces relatable, because they are true, honest, and written with a full heart, because if you ever felt real pain, then you will see yourself somewhere between those lines. And all the scattered references of culture, music, and things, served as anchors that made those pieces go deep in the soul and will make them stay for a long time.
  
  God bless your heart Hanif.
  
  I might be biased about my favorite piece, because it’s the one that introduced me to Hanif Abdurraqib, firsts always have their special place I guess, so I will end this by quoting something from “When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind of Like Being A Chicago Bulls Fan”.
  
  “You may ask why I allow my face to drown in less and less joy with each passing year and I will say I just woke up one day and I was a still photo in everyone else’s home but my own. Or I will say I promise that my legs just need another season, and then I will be who you fell in love with again. And then probably just I’m sorry that there was once a tremendous blue sky and then a decade of hard, incessant rain.”
  
  What a brilliant analogy...
• 
  elisa

  not sure if this was a slog to get through because i’m in a reading slump, because of the collection’s length, its dark subject matter, or just the fact that i’m entering week two of a very groggy flu, but—! i digress! i enjoyed this less than vintage sadness, which was the perfect length to leave me wanting more, and consistently gut-wrenching.
  
  the crown ain’t worth much drags slightly in places, but is nonetheless devastatingly gorgeous, because this is hanif we’re talking about. this is more of a 3.75/3.8 for me; regardless, it’s always a pleasure to get to read from a voice as strong as this one:
  
  

  the night Michael Jackson died / everyone black / in Ohio / danced in a basement / until the walls were moist / until it rained indoors / and we saw our heroes / resurrected in the reflection / of our own drowning

  
  
  —
  
  

  now I got the whole hood grasping for this fly / got my kicks sinking / into the wet mud / got ancestors grabbing at my feet from their graves

  
  
  —
  
  

  there are only so many ways to dream about a corpse before you find new things to call sleep

  
  
  —
  
  

  There are ten different ways to say sunset. The bartender says my face is wearing all of them.

  
  
  —
  
  

  and you are still alive in someone’s mouth.

  
  
  —
  
  

  I am a forest of beginnings. I am never alone. I do not bury. I do not funeral. I can still look into mirrors.
• 
  Ebony Rose

  This is getting 3 stars not because I enjoyed this collection (I didn't). It gets 3 stars because it's objectively good writing tackling difficult but important subject matter.
  
  But for me, this poetry felt really inaccessible and really hard to understand. Maybe it flew over my head but it was so jam packed full of metaphors and twisty wording and concepts that it felt tedious to get through a relatively slim collection. Perhaps I am just not smart enough for this one. And that's ok. Everything ain't for everybody.
• 
  Caitlin Conlon

  4.5 stars. I'm feeling breathless after reading this. I don't think any review I give will do justice to these words. one of the most powerful collections, if not the most, I've ever read.
• 
  Brian Patrick

  Here for every pop punk reference. But also we have to keep poetry in our souls otherwise we might die
• 
  Francis Cooke

  Hanif Abdurraqib is so, so great - it's easy (for me, anyway) to get caught up in the music references that the collection is steeped in at first (Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, ATCQ, Elliot Smith, Drake, Pete Wentz, Jay-Z, the gloriousness of opening the contents page and finding poems titled 'Dudes, We Did Not Go Through the Hassle of Getting These Fake IDs for this Jukebox to Not Have Any Springsteen' and 'Ode to Kanye West in Two Parts, Ending in a Chain of Mothers Rising from the River'), and the love that he has for all of this music and musicians is real and present, but - especially in the virtuosic final section of this collection, and in common with the structure of 'They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us' - the way in which he uses these common touch points to draw you into deeply personal poems of nostalgia, pain, grief, fear, love and anger is incredible. Along with 'They Can't Kill Us...', one of the best books I've read this year.
• 
  Jane

  I wrote my heart in a poem. it took up the whole bedroom. it doesn't pay rent. it stays up watching cities burn to the ground.
  
  I am speechless — there are no words to describe the beautiful, devastating emotion in Abdurraqib's poems.
• 
  Nafiza

  Just about destroyed me.
• 
  J & J

  1.5
• 
  Ann Marie

  Every single poem of this collection punches with some sort of power: recognition, nostalgia, grief, empathy, anger. I loved every piece in this collection.
• 
  alyssa

  I am going to read everything Abdurraqib has ever published and I’m gonna cry through it all and it’s going to be the best plan I’ve had all year!!!!
• 
  Amy

  I am drawn to the utterly honest voice in these poems, and the pop culture references, including music, and the prominent deaths of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland. I would love to hear this poet read his work.
  
  Favorite poems are:
  
  -1995. After the Streetlights Drink Whatever Darkness Is Left (no basketballs for Xmas in order to save the Black boys from danger on the court)
  
  -All of the Black Boys Finally Stopped Packing Switchblades (the reality of the frequency of Black boys being shot because anything in their possession is viewed as a gun/weapon by cops)
  
  -College Avenue, Halloween, 2002 (That last line=WHOA--"Sorry. We thought you were someone else." It works so, so well in terms of 1. the Halloween costume concept, not being recognized in your costume--and this, too, is racially charged, in that the white partygoers couldn't see a Black man as Buddy Holly; he's just a Black guy in an old suit, and 2. with the BS cops use to explain away the constant stopping of All Black Men Because No One Can Tell Them Apart)
  
  -The Ghost of the Author's Mother Has a Conversation With His Fiancee About Highways (Voice from the grave concept, sharing the hard, heartbreaking life of a Black child in the old south)
  
  -The Ghost of the Author's Mother Teaches His Wife How to Cook Fried Chicken (What happens to chicken skin as it's cooked is likened to the violence against Black bodies. Love the final line: "'Til another woman loved him enough to rip every stove out of the wall")
  
  -On Sainthood (Black funeral, for the whole of the atrocities committed against this group)
  
  -The Crown Ain't Worth Much (elegy, ode, praise, sorrow. "I say Mike and a cardinal lands on my shoulder. I say Trayvon and a rainbow stretches over a city where it doesn't rain. I say Sandra and a new tree grows in my father's front yard."
  
  -The "Dispatches From the Black Barbershop, Tony's Chair" series (What a wonderful way to show the passage of time in a neighborhood, in a country. Tony delivers in his own voice news about the changes in the neighborhood while giving direction to a customer to tilt his head this way and that. Spans the years 1996, 2003, 2011, and 2015.)
• 
  Lucas Miller

  Abdurraqib was another guest on Bookfight. He, Tom, and Mike read a collection of Lester Bangs music writing. It was the same one that I had read at least a decade ago. I was very excited. Who knew that MTV would re-enter my adult life through a crop of extremely talented young writers focusing on current events, politics, and only occasionally music. In the wake of the ep, I scoured the internet (went to his website) and read as much of Abdurraqib's essays as I could. This led to a knee jerk purchase of his first poetry collection. It ripened on my shelf for a few months, and got pulled down to be an occasional read. It didn't work out that way.
  
  The last book of poetry I read was Citizen. This undoubtedly affected my reading of The Crown Ain't Worth Much. I fear being a poseur, a hack, of being a tourist. At first, I feared this collection wasn't written "for" me, but that is not the best way to approach poetry. Not that I've got it all figured out.
  
  A few years ago, I read a "manifesto" by David Shields, and the thing that has really stuck in my mind, was that poetry is a type of nonfiction, and people tend to approach it the same way they do fiction, and this is why it is confusing.
  
  I don't think that all of these poems are autobiographical or true to life for Mr. Abdurraqib, but they feel true, and that kept me reading, feeling, turning the pages. Recommended.
• 
  Jolene

  Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite thinkers. He writes the way I want to write. Come for the pop punk references. Stay for the gutting.
  
  Some Favorites
  -
  “When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind of Like Being a Chicago Bulls Fan” (41)
  -
  “After the Cameras Leave, In Three Parts” (90)
  -
  “The Crown Ain't Worth Much” (93)
• 
  Sara Cutaia

  This is a learning book, a re-reading 100 times book, a crying book, a holy book. This is poetry I would shove into someone's hands, even if it meant I had to buy another copy, and another. This is a masterpiece, and I am in awe. It's beautiful in such a sharp way that it cuts you deep, tears your heart, makes you feel your heart beating in your throat at 2am.
• 
  amma.keep.reading

  This book has been seating on my shelves for over a year and it was well worth the wait. Gorgeous cover. Poignant prose. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
• 
  Ð.J. Fontenot

  I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes feeling things.
• 
  Pau

  each poem felt like a punch in the guts
• 
  Ai Miller

  Just a really beautiful and haunting collection. The collection runs in an almost-chronological fashion, so it transforms in this almost story-like fashion, as you watch the tone of the poems shift from concerns of boyhood to elsewhere. It's so worth seeing that transformation especially in considering the shifting way of approaching looking death in the face all the time throughout. There are so many poems in this that I loved; the "Dispatches from the Black Barbershop, Tony's Chair." triad was so good, and "When I say that loving me is kind of like being a Chicago Bulls fan" is just. really incredible.
• 
  Shilo

  "nothing knows the sound of abandonment like a highway does, not even God."
  
  Hanif Abdurraqib's collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much is one of the more powerful poetry collections I've read in a long time. I don't have much to say past that. I don't need to speak for it. It speaks for itself.
  
  "In this version, we are laughing loud enough to drown out the next / line. Kurt sings / They're in my head / And I pretend not to feel winter moving in."
• 
  Grace

  How do you describe utter perfection?
• 
  rosalind

  quarantine buddy read #11 with
  Keagan! rtc
• 
  Mack

  heartbreaking
• 
  m. (archived)

  thank you kathleen.