In Marcus Clayton’s debut hybrid, ¡PÓNK! (Nightboat 2025), Moose writes an unmailed letter to an old lover and remembers sharing Algiers on iPod shuffle with her on their date. He calls the song “that Black Lives Matter type music,” emphasizing the importance of Black leads fronting social justice bands. She says the music doesn’t sound like punk. “Punk can be a lot of things,” he responds. Moose is Afrolatino and lead guitar to Pipebomb!, a Southern California punk band of bone-weary academics. It’s 2016, and the two fantasize over an asteroid destroying the world. “The cracks in the gravel, the exploding bark of trees, the crashing oceans, the collapsed peoples, the chorus of screams, you said, would make an excellent song. ‘It’d be the last great punk song,’ you said, then we laughed, and laughed, and laughed, our cackles in sync as though Armageddon had already soldered our voices together.” They both dream of a world blown apart by solidarity, but Moose also mourns punk as he writes to her years later: “As I write this letter, know that I am trying to find the music again, the wholeness that punk promised me all my life.”
¡PÓNK! is Clayton’s tribute album to “the Black boys, the brown boys, the girls, the femmes, the Natives, the Asians, the trans, the bi, the gays, the lesbians, the impaired, the poor, the bodies freezing on the margins whose identity does not have enough shelter.” Through genre-bending narratives, Clayton writes with the devastating impact of a meteor crash, demanding a punk sensibility that could (and should) rearrange the world, even while asking you to remain tender. ¡PÓNK! will fling you around like a sweaty body in a mosh pit, its experimental chapters reading like a tracklisting firing fast, one song after another. Clayton’s debut is a definitive punk text to smash all others apart and a stunning work of resistance for this exact moment.
You could put on a compilation album before you open ¡PÓNK! and crank the volume up, but Clayton already made you one. See works such as:
- an opera sung by Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, a Cuban with a Pontiac, and Dandelions (fragile white “weeds with trust funds,” names redacted/ethnicity withheld),
- a poetic dissection of the
ally(see: white people, more to follow), - two high school friends reuniting over a friend’s death in Iraq, singing diverging melodies of violence, and
- a chorus of red-eyed tree frogs and yellow-bellied sea snakes of Costa Rica, on a mother’s Planned Parenthood visit.
¡PÓNK! isolates the white colonization of punk, then pushes Black and brown punks to the front. Moose frets over a culture that flattens punk music into a shallow version of itself, mere volume and fear. As antidote, ¡PÓNK! demands a readjusting of genre lines, both in punk music and the book itself. As a result, Clayton’s writing blooms open alongside punk, melancholy and joyful. Moose grows up watching Prince shred on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” identifying punk in his flamboyance, strength, and Blackness. He fronts Pipebomb! alongside bassist Duck and Yacht, a “token white drummer” plagued by white guilt who hates his beautiful house with its multiple bathrooms. The band keeps getting gigs at the last minute by bookers who hope Duck and Moose “stand in front to show diversity,” while Yacht annoys his bandmates by intervening whenever whiteness confronts them. Moose’s wife, Turtledove, is an ethnic studies professor with a book on Chicana punk, We Don’t Need the English: Fighting Nazi Punks with Black and Brown Hardcore. She receives standing ovations for her academic panels, but she’s mostly speaking at conferences packed with white women. Turtledove balances classroom conflicts and MAGA colleagues, validating her queer students of color while pushing cis-het white boys to decenter themselves in the world and stop giving so much credit to Susan B. Anthony.
Like Moose, Clayton is an Afrolatino academic from Southern California, where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. ¡PÓNK! is as much a critique of the whiteness of academia as of the punk scene. Clayton’s characters navigate lives as diversity hires, forced to answer questions on decolonizing the syllabus by white colleagues while motivating Black and brown students. “Moose says he feels he’s doing everything wrong from so many angles: a teacher, a punk, Black, brown.” He teaches a so-called reformed Nazi, who turns in an essay on “gunning down ‘the wetbacks,’” which the department chair says could probably be fixed with a smidge of editing. Moose shrugs, “I guess we’ll just die then.” Clayton locates a brutal fight inside the university, not its solution. The MAGA hat is on the professor. The Klan is on the faculty. Clayton sketches the sheer exhaustion of trying to get everything right when the system is built all wrong, at the hands of the oppressors.
¡PÓNK! keeps returning to shattered glass and blood, while Clayton changes the context of violence to show who controls the frame. Stabbings burst like fast riffs at protests and punk shows. When Turtledove witnesses a white woman shove an Asian man inside an airport, the crowd accommodates the violence with silence. Turtledove refuses to let the incident slide, yelling, “White devil!” The woman attempts to hurl her shoe in response, and bodies move, arms, legs, grabbing, and this is Clayton’s offering: a clear shift on every page, yelling, “Do you see this?” and yes: Do you feel your leg kick? Is your arm thrashing? Are you fighting yet? Turtledove says, “I spent my youth looking out for femmes and people of color in mosh pits; using my small shoulders to protect their bodies from sharpened white elbows, yelling at macho white boys ruining good music with their boots stomping on our toes. I preferred to wear the bruises because I needed to be a shield; I can’t bear to see someone else disappear into black and blue.” Punk is not safe, but neither is the world if you are Black or brown. White people own the stage, wherever you go. When punk singers sing for movement, they scream the same anthems in the open air as they are underground.
Clayton problematizes silence in counterbalance to volume, redacting throughout ¡PÓNK!, even as intention shifts. He strikes out a passage on the “all-Black, nonbinary femme, queer, reparations punk band,” Fuck U Pay Us opening for Bikini Kill. When the opening singer Jasmine Nyende was not allowed back inside the venue by security, Bikini Kill said “nothing for days,” and then, only offered gentle admonishment. Clayton writes, “Fuck their redaction,” striking out behavior posing as punk, but leaving behind the responsibilities. Fuck U Pay Us returns to the page, lyrics unstricken: “We will watch the empire fall!” But when Clayton strikes lines like, “Then again, maybe I would’ve ended up ashes on the highway,” you realize that some redactions are necessary for survival. Some lines are yours to choose to face head-on.
To write on ¡PÓNK! as a white trans punk means making your whiteness visible, then redacting yourself. Maybe at a show a white cis guy once got aggressive, spent an hour and a half with his back turned to the stage. Unblinking, facing you, a foot or two away. Transphobe. Maybe you figured you would get jumped after the show, or right there. If he had, your whiteness would have protected you afterward. You didn’t, so. State your name for the record, then decenter yourself in the mosh pit and the world. To read ¡PÓNK! is to listen to ¡PÓNK!, and hear the influence of Prince and Marvin Gaye. To listen to ¡PÓNK! is to listen to Palestinians and Ugandans and join worldwide protests against injustice fueled by white supremacy. There is no stripping punk of its politics, despite the Sex Pistols of it all. Punk isn’t a fashion or a mood, but a way of witnessing and releasing an accretion of historical trauma and emotion. Turtledove says, “Punk does not celebrate ACAB; it mourns the idea.” When Moose expresses frustration at a punk student who destroys for destruction’s sake, then inhabits activist spaces for “advertisement disguised as social justice,” he points to a punk missing the point. You can smash for the photo-op. But there’s much further to go than that.
Clayton writes, “If you are not Black, or even a colored person person of color, you may want to be the hero, the ally pulling oppressed bodies out of fires. Sometimes, this helps. Other times, some would say, ‘most’ times, this feels like keeping score in hopes to win a trophy, making your heroics tangible.” When Pipebomb! loses a show in the QTPOC community, Moose demonstrates allyship through an absence of validation. He tries “not to think about hierarchy in this moment, if [he is] a good ally.” Clayton instructs turning your eye off yourself and onto the crowd-surfers, flinging themselves into the air. Punk culture survives on trust, on ready hands. Clayton writes, “Learn. The mosh pit is a pogo. Collective imbalances where bodies trust each other to catch the other. To shove someone in the pit should be a defensive motion to assuage collision, to exhaust pressure from the bones, to make sure none of them break.” When Moose and Turtledove go dancing in LA, she watches a rainbow-haired brown femme fling herself off the stage, “confident she’d land in the safety net of her community.” But she lands among white people, headfirst and bleeding. If the mosh pit is a trust fall, punk is as much about the fall as trust. ¡PÓNK! writes against the hard falls in a world that lets Black and brown people down. Clayton’s book corrects the collective imbalance after so much trust has been lost, again and again, and keeps getting stripped away, on and on.
Clayton restores joy to punk in resistance. “They can’t ignore this joy: no folded arms from the sidelines, no pretentious white punks comparing their songs to ’70s Anglo-heroes, no violence perpetrated with their music as a soundtrack. Nothing to prove.” ¡PÓNK!’s joy is unrestrained and collective, a concert that requires participation. In the acknowledgments to ¡PÓNK!, Clayton writes, “For a minute, I really hated this book. . . . Some of it came from the fact that, even as I write this, I can’t tell you what genre I wanted this book to be—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, all of them, none of them. . . . Now I love it again.” A punk sensibility might require this fraught period of not-knowing, like stage diving into a crowd. Clayton points to a sort of friction, kicking and pushing at the edges of how things could be until a shift finally gives way. After finding a dead bird one night, drunk with her friends, Turtledove self-names. If unable to resurrect a turtledove, she transforms herself into one. A punk, crowned. Change rarely has a name at first, until we give it one. If there is no easy classification for ¡PÓNK!, that’s exactly why Clayton’s book is punk as fuck.
