3 Books Published by Button Poetry on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, Hanif 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, 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 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.

"These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make ’a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.’ That’s no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith’s way?saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."?Marcus Wicker "Danez Smith’s BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America."?Rain Taxi

Poetry. African American Studies. "Acclaimed poet Mahogany L. Browne triumphs again with her latest poetry collection SMUDGE, a powerful, intimate, and complex portrait of a girl who deserves more than what she is given: a world in which our hero is both painfully invisible and vulnerably exposed. Browne masterfully invites us into this girl’s life with language that is evocative, nuanced and immediate. The result is a book that is incredibly present. You live each moment presented in the book as if it were your own, and feel deeply the girl’s fears and her humiliations, her hopeful trust and blind love, her shifting sense of safety and self. But despite the honest and harrowing heartbreak that finds its way into the girl, the book nonetheless has a defiant beauty, a strength of character and self that willfully defies the limits others attempt to put on this girl. Browne continues her tradition of creating rich, unflinching, and unapologetic work cataloguing the world as she sees it, and SMUDGE sees her at the top of her game." Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, NEA Poetry Fellow & author of The Year of No Mistakes"