The poet Hanif Abdurraqib is as idiosyncratic as his unclassifiable new book.
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Ducks skim the reflection of a cloudless sky, and purple crocuses poke up through thawing earth.
It is more like an extended prose poem divided into four quarters with time-outs.
An employee at the flower stand recognizes him and says shes excited for his upcoming book event.
Youre either invisible or a nuisance, he says of life unhoused in an American city.
He came up writing in mid-aughts punk zines.
By 2021, he had published five books and won a MacArthur genius grant.
I study tape of my peers, he says, looking ahead to Nelsons new release.
Not on some competition shit.
Some of those are ordinary enough, like the Minnesota Timberwolves or the flowers.
Others are more exotic.
I like vintage stuff.
We walk across the driveway and into a carriage house.
This is a place where work gets done.
Abdurraqib moves fast; he said he recently turned around a 3,000-word essay forTheNew Yorkerin 90 minutes.
He intends to maintain his running through Marchs dual demands of book tour and Ramadan fasting.
In person, hes roughly the same.
I ask him about the candor with which he confronts painful personal history in his new book.
His answer calls back to an earlier conversation over diner omelets about hooping on asphalt versus on hardwood.
But sometimes using poetic forms simply slightly softens the impact so that you could continually endure the harder realities.
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