There is an elegant cadence to the prose, a slight twist in language to create a dynamic image of a simple nighttime scene. Two proud firs. The single star as the sky’s beauty mark.
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight...Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
The summer expands in front of them, and their future disappears. The cheap housing they are cooped up in becomes even less glamorous during the blackouts.