cantfindmybookmark's Reviews (505)

This book is DARK. It’s nihilistic and violent and hopeless. You will want to sit in the dark and stare at a wall when you finish it. You will wonder if there is any good left in the world, anywhere. You might sob. 

I loved it. 

Minor spoilers ahead (all within the first 50 pages of the book). 

Mario, the narrator, and his wife Melisa find out that their daughter Anita has been diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of leukemia. Shortly thereafter, Mario is fired from his job for taking off too much time to care for Anita. The bills pile up. Mario grows desperate. Mario reaches out to a person from his past for a job. The friend gives him a photo, a location, and a gun and Mario kills a man for $6,000. Mario feels no guilt. He did it for his daughter. But when he returns home, his daughter is dead and his marriage is over. 

That’s just the start of the book. Mario’s decent into darkness is just beginning. The book contains supernatural elements, but this is definitely one of those horror books where hell is other people.  Hell is also yourself. Hell is the darkness of society and the cycles of violence we engage in just to make it through the day. 

“And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers. I want us to find each other among the forest of writhing and make a deal. Okay, lover. It is just us now. The only way out is through.”

This is a collection of essays written by a poet, and it shows. In a good way. This book is perfection. I finished it and immediately wanted to reread it. I listened to it on audiobook and halfway through decided I needed a physical copy. 

Each essay in this collection celebrates Black performance while dancing between subjects and personal stories in a way that might have been chaotic in lesser hands but is captivating when done by Abdurraqib. 

There’s “This One Goes Out to All the Magical Negroes” which deftly pirouettes between discussions of The Lion King, the album Diplomatic Immunity, Dave Chappell, and the 1920s Black magician Ellen Armstrong. 

There’s “16 Ways of Looking at Blackface” which looks at  the paradox of Charles Dickens’ complicated racial politics and his relationship with and writings about the Black dancer William Henry Lane (Master Juba). It discusses white people pretending to be Black on the internet, the epic dance battles of the 1840s between Master Juba and the white minstrel dancer John Diamond, Black skincare routines, and white kids donning blackface at college parties.

In “On the Certain and Uncertain Movements of Limbs” Abdurraqib discusses code-switching as a child, the Cosby Show, Whitney Houston, and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 

It’s also worth noting that the audiobook is narrated by JD Jackson who is one of my all time favorite narrators. He does such a fantastic job. When I think about this book, I think about his voice.