Overview

From a prize-winning poet, a new collection that chronicles a weekend in the life of a group of friends coming of age in East Harlem at the dawn of the hip-hop era Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixes ""city life with a sense of the transcendent"" (NPR.org). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a ""crew"" coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s. In poems written in couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo recreates a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events: ""That was the summer we all tried to fly. All but one of us succeeded.""

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9780143132691

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Reviews

Praise for The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon: A vivid portrait of a late-twentieth-century Nuyorican musical community . . . Perdomo manages to mix the language of city life with a sense of the transcendent. --NPR.org A rollicking, pleasurable excursion into the world of a musician created in the memory of the author's late uncle, Shorty. --The Washington Post With his new collection of poems, Perdomo offers a soulful melody that is as deep and vital and dynamic as the poet's roots in New York City's Nuyorican poetry scene. . . . With Shorty, Willie exercises a mastery of language and imagery that hums us into a furious clave of grace. --Poets & Writers

Advance praise for The Crazy Bunch Twenty years after Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, the poet emerges from the lived experience of urban culture with a mature blossoming. Perdomo writes with a faith in the beauty of the intersectionality of what makes East Harlem all things. Perdomo's is a love that awakens in the beauty of the present moment, with an architecture that pays homage to a culture under siege, to those who died and those who survive in the collective genius of one's own song. --Afaa M. Weaver, Sarah Lawrence College Praise for The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon: A vivid portrait of a late-twentieth-century Nuyorican musical community . . . Perdomo manages to mix the language of city life with a sense of the transcendent. --NPR.org A rollicking, pleasurable excursion into the world of a musician created in the memory of the author's late uncle, Shorty. --The Washington Post With his new collection of poems, Perdomo offers a soulful melody that is as deep and vital and dynamic as the poet's roots in New York City's Nuyorican poetry scene. . . . With Shorty, Willie exercises a mastery of language and imagery that hums us into a furious clave of grace. --Poets & Writers

Author Information

Willie Perdomo is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix, The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime. Winner of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, the New York City Book Award, and a PEN Open Book Award, Perdomo was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. He is co-editor of the anthology Latínext, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, African Voices, and Best American Poetry 2019. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy and was recently appointed State Poet of New York, 2021-2023.

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