Book Review: The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraquib

Reviewed by Stephanie Barbé Hammer

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much
Poems by Hanif Willis-Abdurraquib
Button Poetry, July 2016
$16.00; 124 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1943735044

An older reader (like this one) might need the space of several poems to enter the verbiage and rhythm of Willis-Abdurraqib’s energetic debut collection. But once that threshold is crossed, this book cannot be put down. Intensely musical, as well as autobiographical, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much summons the winding, purposely run-on sentences of Rap, the emotional depth of Soul, the repeating, varying chord-progressions of Jazz, the urban melancholy of Bruce Springsteen, and even the sentimentality of the band Journey.  

Beginning in 1998 and ending in 2015, Willis-Abdurraquib’s collection takes us to his first and last punk rock concerts, shares the evolving commentary from a local barber in Columbus OH, and escorts us to an array of block parties, college parties, and funerals. As in a symphony, themes and forms are introduced – musical artists, the ghost of Willis-Abdurraquib’s mother, the voice of his wife, the ode, and the elegy. These fade out and return, making the poems talk to each other in ways that unify this collection, despite its range of feelings and language.

In a series of “Dispatches from the Black Barbershop” Tony tells a complex story of desperation and persistence that begins in 1996:

we all know a couple niggas doin a bid derrick ain’t comin home for another 20 cuz he shot westside trevor’s whip after trevor slapped his baby’s mom yo tuck your lip so I can get this beard . . .

and culminates in gentrification in 2015:

I ain’t leavin my home nigga they gonna have to drag me through the streets they gonna have to pull me right off the porch I ain’t goin out like I’m soft my daddy built that house my daddy even know it my son be sending letters from jail my son gotta come home to the same bedroom he grew up in I ain’t leaving unless I bleed out right where they killed big mike you remember that nigga his moms live out west now they getting all of us outta here swear to god swear to god I’mma gonna be buried right …. underneath another starbucks or some shit and I’mma be a ghost I’mma keep the hood safe after I die the o.g’s ain’t save us but shit my name still on the door for one more night nigga let me give you a cut ‘fore you head back

Elsewhere Willis-Abdurraqib uses anaphora to make a devastating point about race in “I do not call this ‘War:’”

I do not stand in the doorway and kiss my wife like I will never see her again.

I do not say noose when I mean bullet.

I do not say bullet when asked what keeps me awake at night.

I do not keep track of the names.

I do not keep track of my own body.

I do not look at graves.

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much takes us to rooftops and parking lots, college campuses, and funeral parlors. Never simple, always beautiful, Willis-Abdurraquib’s poems expand what epic story poetry can tell.

Stephanie Barbé Hammer is a 4-time Pushcart Prize nominee as well as a published novelist, poet, and literary scholar. She has published poems, fiction, and nonfiction in the Bellevue Literary Review, CRATE, Pearl, Apeiron, The James Franco Review, and The Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is currently working with Spout Hill Press on a book about how to write Magical Realism and she lives in Coupeville, WA, but escapes to Los Angeles whenever possible.