A brilliant collection of essays on music, connection, grief, identity, revolution, home, and optimism. There were lines that made me shiver and phrases that gave way to incredible expansiveness. It’s soft and fierce, joyous and poignant.

I love the variety of stylistic choices, with some pieces very linear and others more poetic - bursts of thought and emotion. I was underlining sentence after sentence, desperate to retain all the sparks and introspection. And Abdurraqib writes about grief and loss with such clarity and tenderness. 

While I thought the book as a whole was incredibly curated, I found the second section much more powerful. I struggled a bit with some of the initial essays (with occasionally repetitive takeaways) that covered musicians and songs I didn’t know nearly as intimately as Abdurraqib. Occasionally, the most thoughtful messages were overshadowed by convoluted word choices that ultimately made the writing difficult to decipher. We danced

But overall, I was captivated by this book and these words.

CW: death, suicide, murder, police brutality, racism & racial slurs, grief, islamophobia, gun violence, hate crime, addiction, drug use & addiction, mass shootings, xenophobia, sexism, cultural appropriation

Follow me on TikTok for book recommendations!