The Crown Ain't Worth Much

by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib's first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Willis-Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Willis-Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Race, Memoir, Contemporary, Music, Essays

102 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2016

About the author

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, and was met with critical acclaim. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘In this version, Everyone we love is still alive.’

A great song sticks in the mind, it’s melody pulling memory along behind it. Do you have any favorite songs like that—the songs that transport you back to the time and place when you first loved it? Songs that taste of autumn rain, choruses that crash into your mind like waves on a now faraway beach beside a former love or lost friend? Moving to the rhythm of music and aglow in bittersweet nostalgia comes the poetry of Hanif Abdurraqib in The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, a powerful collection chronicling a coming-of-age amidst jukeboxes, crumbling neighborhoods paved over by gentrification, crushes, concerts, ‘basketball courts & the older brothers / who never found their way back home.’ Through narrative poetry full of linguistic acrobatics that bounce across the page like song lyrics and pluck the heartstrings of readers like a guitar amped for stadium rock, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is a moving and unforgettable read.

We, the war generation.
The only way we know how to bury our dead
is with blood, or sweat, or sex
or anything pouring from wet skin
to signify we were here, and the wooden floor
of a basement belonging to an old house on Neil Avenue
makes as good a burial ground as any
says the small boom box now playing DJ
in the center of this room,
and the Whitney CD inside,
pouring out of the speakers just loudly enough
to let everyone in this room
get a small taste of Whitney alive and young…
—from At the House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston was Dead

Hanif Abdurraqib is best known for his riveting essays that wind through research and narratives to deliver a message amalgamated through the emotional resonance of various anecdotes but the same power and poetic storytelling is found succinct and soulful within his poetry. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much finds reflections on music ricocheting against memories and intimate personal investigations of an upbringing in a place where ‘everyone who lives there misses someone they thought would live forever.’ Death and loss are around every corner like the lyrical rhymes balancing the moments of joy and tenderness in each poem as ‘people have to mourn the shatter of anything that they can look into and see how alive they still are.’ These are poems that dive deep into ‘what it is to grow up poor,’ to repeatedly face a new death in the neighborhood, or ‘the destruction of all things too beautiful to endure an untouched life.’ These poems are an elegy to his upbringing in Columbus, Ohio, to the friends and family there, to the desires to leave it all behind and why music is such a necessary escape thinking ‘maybe if we stack all of the speakers in this town as high as we can and begin to go up,we can escape even this.’ Though it is also an elegy to those who were never given the chance to escape.

‘in
the winter
danny lost track of time shooting free throws
& we had to bury all of the parts of him that the
night had left,
still brimming with bullets & then
none of the black boys
got new basketballs for
christmas’

While these poems are awash in grief and sorrow, there is also a rather infectious humor and warmth to them as well. We have poems in defense of the word “moist,” jokes on aging out of parties and into NPR, memories of writing misheard lyrics ‘on the wall of places where people emptied themselves of everything they challenged their insides to own.’ There is also a lovely litany of music references, with Nick Drake, Jay-Z, Elliott Smith, Fall Out Boy,Taking Back Sunday, Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest and more harmonizing along with personal reflections. He is at his best when the songs touch him in ways that spark personal revelations or trigger memories of concerts or parties that inspired deep reflection. A Halloween party, for instance makes him realize:

‘I am becoming more and more like my father every day, the way we both swing into the darkness like it is our birthright, the way we both crave the moon and the breeze dancing…’

Family is always around each poem and he makes us consider how we look in their eyes. ‘I wonder if this is how our parents see us now,’ he muses, ‘promising gifts birthed & pulled from a loving shell only to grow into another disaster uninvited & spreading itself along the streets with a slow crawl.’ But family extends beyond blood and even friendship into a general community here. There is a brilliant series of poems, Dispatches from the Black Barbershop where the voice of Tony the Barber chronicles the decline of the neighborhood and the gentrification that follows. But always brilliant as well are his poem titles which half the time could be poems themselves.

In Defense of that Winter Where I listened to the First Taking Back Sunday Album Every Day Until the Snow Peeled Itself Back from the Grass and I Found My College Sweatshirt Again

Notes on Waiting for the Dog to Find the Perfect Place to Take a Shit While Morning Cuts Through the Sky, Fresh from Another Darkness

There is a warm creativity reverberating through these poems, such as one titled as a draft of wedding vows created as an erasure poem from Virginia Woolf’s suicide note to Leonard Woolf, where we find him ‘doing what seems…will give me the greatest possible happiness…’ reversing death into a declaration of love with:

‘What I want to say is You…have…saved me.
…
Everything has gone from me…
…
But the certainty of your goodness.’

There is a real tenderness to many of these poems. I love the moments of early crushes, the vulnerability of saying ‘I just learned how to make room under my tongue for the name of someone who loves me,’ or moments that touch memories of childhood like stepping out into the snow where ‘I watch the skyline huddle and shiver / like I was seeing it from my mother’s backseat for / the first time.’ It is such lovely imagery and each poem contrasts the dark with the light, the heaviness with lightness, the death with life.

I walked home in three sweaters and two pairs
of pants, shivering in the darkness

asking myself how long it would be before I could finally
peel back all of those layers and become a

new, unbreakable device.

Harrowing, haunting, humorous and deeply human, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is a fabulous collection of poetry. Hanif Abdurraqib blends musings on Blackness, memory, music, misery and more into each gorgeously crafted poem that is sure to strum each emotional chord in your heart. An incredible writer, an incredible poet, and an incredible collection of poems.

4.5/5

[Dana Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like a eulogy, like music, like a condemnation, like damnation, like a damned nation. This is a stunning collection of trauma transcribed into art, of pain that can be transformed but never erased. It is poetry that sits heavy on the chest, a poetry of open wounds. Reader beware, but reader: read it.

[James Francisco Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved every piece in this collection.

[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally feeling the pain and all the bitterness as well as the good and bad memories of being born as a black in the 1990s.
The book has been written as poetry and prose in a short and concise pattern.
The main themes include bullying, discrimination and the many things that the author had to face while growing up.
I loved the way the book has been written in such a transparent manner. All kinds of emotions just keep pouring out page after page.
I just loved how effortlessly every tiniest feel has been expressed in this one.
One of those books where the author expresses exactly what he wants 👍
And yes, him being a great music lover and expressing it in this one made me love the book more👍
I love his expressions on his wedding and his wife😊
He is just so real👍

*I love the cover so much!!!

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to blow the dust off of your brain, or your heart, pick up this breathtaking book of poetry.

[jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

hanif just embodies excellence - as a writer, as a poet, as a human being, as a handler of his personal twitter account. this is poetry with street views, with pop punk boyhood and neighborhood violence, with riffs on blackness, memory, and motif.

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

not sure if this was a slog to get through because i’m in a reading slump, because of the collection’s length, its dark subject matter, or just the fact that i’m entering week two of a very groggy flu, but—! i digress! i enjoyed this less than vintage sadness, which was the perfect length to leave me wanting more, and consistently gut-wrenching.

the crown ain’t worth much drags slightly in places, but is nonetheless devastatingly gorgeous, because this is hanif we’re talking about. this is more of a 3.75/3.8 for me; regardless, it’s always a pleasure to get to read from a voice as strong as this one:

the night Michael Jackson died / everyone black / in Ohio / danced in a basement / until the walls were moist / until it rained indoors / and we saw our heroes / resurrected in the reflection / of our own drowning

—

now I got the whole hood grasping for this fly / got my kicks sinking / into the wet mud / got ancestors grabbing at my feet from their graves

—

there are only so many ways to dream about a corpse before you find new things to call sleep

—

There are ten different ways to say sunset. The bartender says my face is wearing all of them.

—

and you are still alive in someone’s mouth.

—

I am a forest of beginnings. I am never alone. I do not bury. I do not funeral. I can still look into mirrors.

[Ebony Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is getting 3 stars not because I enjoyed this collection (I didn't). It gets 3 stars because it's objectively good writing tackling difficult but important subject matter.

But for me, this poetry felt really inaccessible and really hard to understand. Maybe it flew over my head but it was so jam packed full of metaphors and twisty wording and concepts that it felt tedious to get through a relatively slim collection. Perhaps I am just not smart enough for this one. And that's ok. Everything ain't for everybody.

[Brian Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here for every pop punk reference. But also we have to keep poetry in our souls otherwise we might die

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I'm feeling breathless after reading this. I don't think any review I give will do justice to these words. one of the most powerful collections, if not the most, I've ever read.

[Francis Cooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hanif Abdurraqib is so, so great - it's easy (for me, anyway) to get caught up in the music references that the collection is steeped in at first (Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, ATCQ, Elliot Smith, Drake, Pete Wentz, Jay-Z, the gloriousness of opening the contents page and finding poems titled 'Dudes, We Did Not Go Through the Hassle of Getting These Fake IDs for this Jukebox to Not Have Any Springsteen' and 'Ode to Kanye West in Two Parts, Ending in a Chain of Mothers Rising from the River'), and the love that he has for all of this music and musicians is real and present, but - especially in the virtuosic final section of this collection, and in common with the structure of 'They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us' - the way in which he uses these common touch points to draw you into deeply personal poems of nostalgia, pain, grief, fear, love and anger is incredible. Along with 'They Can't Kill Us...', one of the best books I've read this year.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote my heart in a poem. it took up the whole bedroom. it doesn't pay rent. it stays up watching cities burn to the ground.

I am speechless — there are no words to describe the beautiful, devastating emotion in Abdurraqib's poems.

[Nafiza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just about destroyed me.

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first full collection of poetry from Hanif! It has all the charms of his later non-fiction—blending memories of growing up on the East side of Columbus with musings on grief and musical references. Abdurraqib has a talent for creating whole words in few lines. I felt transported to Ohio in the early 2000’s. To funerals and nights at the bar and days spent at the basketball court. I had too many favorites to count, and it was lovely company to carry these poems everywhere I went<3

[J & J · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5

[Jolene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite thinkers. He writes the way I want to write. Come for the pop punk references. Stay for the gutting.

Some Favorites
- “When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind of Like Being a Chicago Bulls Fan” (41)
- “After the Cameras Leave, In Three Parts” (90)
- “The Crown Ain't Worth Much” (93)

[Merritt K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is such a versatile and skilled poet -- he covers a range of tones, topics, and forms here that's truly incredible. I usually speed through poetry collections but this book took me months to read because I had to put it down so frequently to give the pieces space to breathe. The best collection of poems I've read in a long time.

[artemis · Rating 5 out of 5]

“they never get old & by they I mean black people in America”

[alyssa]

I am going to read everything Abdurraqib has ever published and I’m gonna cry through it all and it’s going to be the best plan I’ve had all year!!!!

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

just brilliant

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am drawn to the utterly honest voice in these poems, and the pop culture references, including music, and the prominent deaths of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland. I would love to hear this poet read his work.

Favorite poems are:

-1995. After the Streetlights Drink Whatever Darkness Is Left (no basketballs for Xmas in order to save the Black boys from danger on the court)

-All of the Black Boys Finally Stopped Packing Switchblades (the reality of the frequency of Black boys being shot because anything in their possession is viewed as a gun/weapon by cops)

-College Avenue, Halloween, 2002 (That last line=WHOA--"Sorry. We thought you were someone else." It works so, so well in terms of 1. the Halloween costume concept, not being recognized in your costume--and this, too, is racially charged, in that the white partygoers couldn't see a Black man as Buddy Holly; he's just a Black guy in an old suit, and 2. with the BS cops use to explain away the constant stopping of All Black Men Because No One Can Tell Them Apart)

-The Ghost of the Author's Mother Has a Conversation With His Fiancee About Highways (Voice from the grave concept, sharing the hard, heartbreaking life of a Black child in the old south)

-The Ghost of the Author's Mother Teaches His Wife How to Cook Fried Chicken (What happens to chicken skin as it's cooked is likened to the violence against Black bodies. Love the final line: "'Til another woman loved him enough to rip every stove out of the wall")

-On Sainthood (Black funeral, for the whole of the atrocities committed against this group)

-The Crown Ain't Worth Much (elegy, ode, praise, sorrow. "I say Mike and a cardinal lands on my shoulder. I say Trayvon and a rainbow stretches over a city where it doesn't rain. I say Sandra and a new tree grows in my father's front yard."

-The "Dispatches From the Black Barbershop, Tony's Chair" series (What a wonderful way to show the passage of time in a neighborhood, in a country. Tony delivers in his own voice news about the changes in the neighborhood while giving direction to a customer to tilt his head this way and that. Spans the years 1996, 2003, 2011, and 2015.)

[Luke Hillier · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I purchased this mostly because of the gorgeous cover, and also because I grew up about 20 minutes away from Columbus, Ohio where the writer's from and most of the poems take place in. turns out judging a book by its cover can sometimes pay off big time, because this was truly a powerhouse collection of poems that I could not put down.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time even knowing where to start. This is an ode to the enduring resilience and strength and love of Black Americans and particularly those in his own life. This is an elegy lamenting the too-soon and often senseless or unjust losses of Black Americans, particularly his mother as well as the seemingly countless (within these poems) young people murdered by street violence and police brutality. This is an anthem for young Black men growing up in neighborhoods like his faced with poverty, violence, and gentrification and still being such fertile ground for life in spite of that. This is powerful and hard and haunting and really, really good.

I most enjoyed Hanif at his most poetic and evocative, when you knew he was trying to write beautifully and he just pulled it off masterfully, but his more sparse, harsh, and straightforward voice is also gripping and great. Death is deeply and uniquely pervasive here (which he acknowledges explicitly in one poem), particularly in relation to both street violence and police brutality, with the motif of gunshots as lullabies recurring and sirens offering a soundtrack throughout. There were some other trends throughout (the use of names, pop culture references, the poems' titles) that at times felt jarring and in the hands of lesser poets would be gimmicky but they work out here, and the running bit with the barber is actually a highlight. There were a handful that didn't really "land" with me, but the majority did, and the ones listed below were standout homeruns.

"On Hunger," "All of the Black Boys Finally Stopped Packing Switchblades," "Sheridan Avenue, 2002," "Ode to Pete Wentz, Ending in Tyler's Funeral," "My Wife Says if You Live 20 Years," and the titular poem were my favorites.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abdurraqib was another guest on Bookfight. He, Tom, and Mike read a collection of Lester Bangs music writing. It was the same one that I had read at least a decade ago. I was very excited. Who knew that MTV would re-enter my adult life through a crop of extremely talented young writers focusing on current events, politics, and only occasionally music. In the wake of the ep, I scoured the internet (went to his website) and read as much of Abdurraqib's essays as I could. This led to a knee jerk purchase of his first poetry collection. It ripened on my shelf for a few months, and got pulled down to be an occasional read. It didn't work out that way.

The last book of poetry I read was Citizen. This undoubtedly affected my reading of The Crown Ain't Worth Much. I fear being a poseur, a hack, of being a tourist. At first, I feared this collection wasn't written "for" me, but that is not the best way to approach poetry. Not that I've got it all figured out.

A few years ago, I read a "manifesto" by David Shields, and the thing that has really stuck in my mind, was that poetry is a type of nonfiction, and people tend to approach it the same way they do fiction, and this is why it is confusing.

I don't think that all of these poems are autobiographical or true to life for Mr. Abdurraqib, but they feel true, and that kept me reading, feeling, turning the pages. Recommended.

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"nothing knows the sound of abandonment like a highway does, not even God."

Hanif Abdurraqib's collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much is one of the more powerful poetry collections I've read in a long time. I don't have much to say past that. I don't need to speak for it. It speaks for itself.

"In this version, we are laughing loud enough to drown out the next / line. Kurt sings / They're in my head / And I pretend not to feel winter moving in."

[Sara Cutaia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a learning book, a re-reading 100 times book, a crying book, a holy book. This is poetry I would shove into someone's hands, even if it meant I had to buy another copy, and another. This is a masterpiece, and I am in awe. It's beautiful in such a sharp way that it cuts you deep, tears your heart, makes you feel your heart beating in your throat at 2am.

[amma.keep.reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been seating on my shelves for over a year and it was well worth the wait. Gorgeous cover. Poignant prose. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Ð.J. Fontenot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes feeling things.

[Pau · Rating 5 out of 5]

each poem felt like a punch in the guts

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

there’s a small shelf of late 2000teens contemporary poetry (Madness, Crush, Bluets, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, etc) that become so universally admired, and so imitated, copied and copied and copied, that it’s near impossible to say how one of them really is — when I talk about them I feel like I’m not praising or criticizing them alone but also gesturing towards a (young, online) cohort of poets who’ve memorized every turn/feint/wriggle/comma in these books

this book of poems is one of those

good in its own right but it’s impossible for me to read them without thinking of all their parrots

[Ai Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a really beautiful and haunting collection. The collection runs in an almost-chronological fashion, so it transforms in this almost story-like fashion, as you watch the tone of the poems shift from concerns of boyhood to elsewhere. It's so worth seeing that transformation especially in considering the shifting way of approaching looking death in the face all the time throughout. There are so many poems in this that I loved; the "Dispatches from the Black Barbershop, Tony's Chair." triad was so good, and "When I say that loving me is kind of like being a Chicago Bulls fan" is just. really incredible.