Additional praise for

Hanif Abdurraqib

“There are at least seventeen reasons why Hanif Abdurraqib is one of the most prolific cultural critics in the nation. Reading his latest book of essays reminded of reason #4. No writer alive writes first and last sentences like Hanif. When I initially read Hanif I didn’t realize how much his blistering first and last sentences were really inflected by the middles of his pieces. Middles. In this collection, like all his writing, Hanif guides us to the middle of the text, the music, the town, the culture(s), the nation. Once there, we see and hear details and notes we’ve never experienced. Neither bombastic, nor minimalist, the essays in this collection weave in and out of the margins, doing what only the greatest essays do: they become soulful, intellectual music I long to pause, rewind, play. Pause. Rewind. Play. Over and over again.”

—Kiese Laymon

“Music belongs to those who create it right up until the moment it doesn’t. When a song is released, it belongs to everyone at once and there are a lot of writers who get intent right. There are a lot of people who hear an artist screaming into the canyon and correctly diagnose what they were trying to get at, but it takes someone special to hear the echoes. It takes someone special to hear the life a song takes on beyond intent, the way that it reacts with people, not the thing it meant but the things it’ll come to mean to different people from different walks of life, all who will glean something unique, something personal but always something equally valuable from it. Abdurraqib has that gift and in this collection, he shows it off in a way that shines a light on just how much music belongs to everyone.”

—Dan Campbell, Lead Singer of The Wonder Years and Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties