All Black Everything

by Shane Book

The lyrics in All Black Everything shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with Shane Book’s blade of caustic irony against the worldwide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet.

The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. This is an original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is a redemption song.
 

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

Published November 21, 2023

About the author

Shane Book is the author of Congotronic , and Ceiling of Sticks , winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. He is also a filmmaker whose award-winning work (Dust (2013) and Praise and Blame (2014)) has screened around the world in numerous film festivals and on television. He was educated at the University of Western Ontario; the University of Victoria; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and magazines and in more than twenty anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets and The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry .

Book has received several honours including a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, Fellowships to the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Telluride Film Festival, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award.

Reviews

[Etienne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately the poetry of this book didn't resonate with me. I didn't like it!

[Sassy Sarah Reads · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF @ page 57- 1 star

This poetry collection is very obsessed with material wealth and things. A lot of this collection feels like a flex on all the luxury items that the author owns- clothes and cars are mentioned way too much. The misogyny of lines like, "Loved that bottom so much/ I wanted to piss on it," are not it and quickly made me want to stop reading. I decided to keep going a bit more, but I was still unimpressed with the blatant obsession with consumerism and obsession with America's capitalism. It's an excess of sex for profit, drugs for power, and fashion brands of the highest caliber. I don't think Shane Book is a poet that I vibe with and that's okay. I'm sure others will love him.

I've gone back and changed my generous 2 stars to a 1.

[Derek Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with Gabriel Noel's review. While I am all for negative reviews, I am only for them if they are written in a fair and nuanced way. Some of these negative reviews seem to lack an understanding of basic poetics, especially considering how the persona-like speaker of these poems is being viewed as literally the actual author. I think such a misconstrued reading is due to the dominance of the confessional mode many popular poets occupy these days, where it might be easy to assume the speaker of the poems IS the author, or at least an extension of the author's self. Here, for Book's poems, this would be a poor way to approach the reading of this work. These poems are at once playful, ironic, and utilizing elements of hip-hop and popular culture to poke at the very weaknesses of these commodified items within a heavily commercialized world.

I think there are a handful of poems from the collection that can be read as ars poeticas about the very creation of the work featured in this book. For instance, the compact and complex lyric poem "Modern":

It is customs.
It is feelings.
It is wolfed on fealty
to the meat marketing
board. And the meat.

These "customs" and "feelings" are that of the black diasporic collective the speaker is speaking to and for. With a title like All Black Everything that immediately draws connotations of songs from Jay-Z , Lil-Wayne, Kendrick Lamar, and others. It is these "customs" and "feelings" that are being laid bare in these poems, and showcased as both gain and subsequent loss as they are fed upon by the "marketing board". But the board doesn't just want those things. They want the meat, too.

If you are a reader who wants to be challenged, and also wants an experience with work operating within a modern vein of the lyrical mode, then I think this book is very much for you.

[Gyalten Lekden · Rating 3 out of 5]

This poetry collection did not do much for me, unfortunately. I enjoyed that, even in this short collection, the poems showed a varied rhythm and prosody, always with a lyrical feel but not in the way that each poem felt the same as the last. That was nice. And occasionally I found myself struck by strong imagery. The poems explore a lot of contradictions, as ideas of poverty, sickness, and oppression clash against consumerism, bombast, and peacocking. There seemed a quiet violence weaving its way through the substrate of many pieces of this collection, not unifying them, necessarily, but not letting them stay distinct and unconnected either. So, it would be wrong to say there is nothing in this collection, but, still, it didn’t speak to me. There is a level of abstraction with most of the poems that feels less like a space to be filled with thought and emotion and more an intentional distance that feels cold, like it doesn’t want to get too close to the emotions underneath. Even with my appreciation for the diversity of poetic style and the occasional evocative imagery nothing felt compelling to me. There were no poems, not even any lines or sections, where I had to just stop and read it again, experience it again, and pause and live with it, within it. Even the playfulness felt calculated, and while I don’t doubt there is an audience who may be enthralled with the worlds that Book creates none were particularly inviting to me.

I want to thank the author, the publisher University of Iowa Press, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC given by NetGalley for Honest Review

Black diaspora and global consumerism unwound and broken down through deliciously lyrical and fresh prose. I think a lot of people who have reviewed this so far have missed the satirical and ironic look at excess through these poems. Book takes on the persona of the system which oppresses him and pulls it's teeth from the inside out.

It's fresh, rhythmic, and innovative.

My favorite poems are: "Kofi Mnemonic", "Sarasota Sweats", "Caribbean Flex", and "Nice For What."