This is a harder book to review because honestly I could not tell you what it was about. Parts of it seemed like an almost R Kelly level of teenage infatuation, part of it was an immigrant coming of age story, part of it was a secret plot set in an Ethiopian dystopia?? There is a character named Ayale, a city that starts with a B and a parking lot that is not really a parking lot at all.

This book is a celebration of black life, black joy and black tragedy. It’s broken down into four sort of sections, childhood, teenage, adulthood and author’s personal heroes. One of the poems, or more rightfully elegy, focuses on Booker Wright and his life. It is my favorite. You can hear the humming of the restaurant, the quiet murmurs of the patronage, the slap of good Southern cooking, the rhythmic melody of Wright’s own voice. It’s quiet beautiful, just as the rest of the book. When read together, it sings like an old blues melody.

This book is hugely entertaining and almost compulsively tradable. Almost anyone can relate to Noah’s sentiments, especially those who do not feel like they belong to any particular social or racial identity. Alternating between Noah’s life and commentary about the history of Apartheid and post Apartheid life, the book gives a decent sense of time and space. That being said, it’s also unbearably liberal and optimistic. Noah has this idea that the root of racism is ignorance. I don’t think it’s ignorance so much as a willful neglect and even perverse pleasure in the pain of others.

Personally, I would have liked the book a little bit more if we weren’t inside this highly anxious Koredo’s head all the time because it feeds into my own anxieties. That being said, it’s a very clever dark humor satire situation that is not completely without its charms.

Rabbit made me laugh til I wanted to cry and cry until I wanted to laugh. Finding the absurdity in deep intergenerational poverty is a tough balance and the book walked the border of being too callous and yet deeply understanding. Above all, it’s written from a place of love for the hood and yearning to understand why people make the tough decisions that they do and how forgiving and helping people can be even when they have next to nothing themselves. It also makes you think about parenting in a different way, about how family is not always family, how a community brings up a child.

This is the type of book you gotta read aloud, the type you either get or you don’t and if you don’t it’s not for you and that’s okay. It’s loud, it’s proud (ain’t no asking for mercy/no regret/no forgiveness either), rhythmic. In the brief 80 something pages, Kapri sets you on fire, excites you, scares you, makes you feel at once alienated and comforted. In short, it’s the best barstool conversation you’ll ever have with a poet.

Wowowowowow I love José Olivarez and this book just understands what it means to be an immigrant child. It’s like eating KFC with Maggi sauce, like your mom’s homemade ‘pasta’ that still tastes like curry, like love that sometimes feels like hate because it’s so strong and so scared, like love that doesn’t get said.