PositiveThe Nation... yet another domain of performance is Black masculinity and its heartbreaking negotiation of love and violence, which Abdurraqib depicts, skillfully and tenderly, toward the book’s finale. Indeed, when seen from this vantage, Abdurraqib’s meditations on performance could extend ad infinitum. In his mind it becomes not so much a discrete event or object but rather any attempt to bridge the questions who am I? and what could I someday be, and who will be there with me? That bridge is life itself, and one walks across it until one grows insensate, abandons the company of others, or otherwise reaches the other side ... Even after such lengths are crossed, encores continue to impress ... The imbrication of performance and life is familiar territory, too, for readers of theorists like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, who suggested that the improvisation required of Black life was not unlike jazz or the freestyle. If not in such lofty terms, Abdurraqib makes a contribution to this discourse with his latest collection ... If everyone is putting on an act, how could a person live fully, with a sense that their relationships were real and worthwhile—not merely objects of interpretation? But if Abdurraqib does not come across as a cynic, it is entirely because of the ubiquity of his earnest narration. His highly sincere style recalls Black poets like Ross Gay and Lucille Clifton, whose celebratory incursions are a salve for Black mourning, and a rebuke of its easy ubiquity in representations of Black life. As with the works of these writers, the essays fulfill a timely desire for literature that can console. Abdurraqib’s ebullience for pop culture and history is meant, similarly, to feel infectious—after all, as long as the job is done well, the care a writer takes with the subject can alchemically become our own. To artfully induce surprise while conveying one’s adoration proves difficult all the same, and Abdurraqib’s insights about such well-known cultural figures are more often straightforward and agreeable explanations rather than opportunities for close attention and careful use of rhetoric to speak for themselves ... Such apologies for one’s own subject matter can cause a writer’s voice to lapse, besides often doing less to clarify matters than they suggest on first reading ... In sections like these which cover relatively unknown artists, one often desires more straight reportage to supplement the book’s predominantly lyrical style. These sections, along with prose-poetic interludes titled \'On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance,\' embody what can be both exciting and frustrating in the lyric essay as a genre: the reliance on affect, memoir, and leaps of association to construct meaning. With Abdurraqib’s instinct toward fragmentation, precision (and all that makes his subjects memorable) can be lost, along with an accurate representation of the sensuality, obscenity, and risk that drive so much of Black performance.
