The lyrics in All Black Everything shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with Shane Book鈥檚 blade of caustic irony against the worldwide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet.
The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. This is an original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is a redemption song.
鈥All Black Everything proposes an expansive, global poetics, which is equally a poetics of Black diasporan fluency. All Black鈥檚 poems ride the crosscurrents of history and popular culture through African America, the Caribbean, West Africa, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As references whirl and constellate, All Black鈥檚 language grows dense and intricate. It gathers color and image. It acquires regional inflections, absorbs a riches of sound, and riffs on proverbial wisdom. The global reach of these poems works to collect and synthesize fragments of culture. Connections are established across time and distance. This synthesis happens as we read, and the rhythms of Black language and music become its measure.鈥濃擪aie Kellough, author, Magnetic Equator
鈥淓very rewind rewounds as Book鈥檚 book bars out (like breaks free). Reader, peep game鈥 where game is play, prey, and how they stay laid down in an unsound system of robber-baron domination, post-Maria neglected Puerto Rico, (in)appropriation, and grief on grief on grief. Ergo: 鈥榁ery hardcore business, man.鈥 All Black Everything left me syntaxed, thus spun as black wax under a needle; the poet on some Tender Buttons, but the buttons are on MPCs or 808s. Get it, get it. It鈥檚 鈥榮o good, God,鈥 Book leaves black 鈥榮atchels stuffed with green.鈥 I pray on everything: should we meet in the lettuce aisles of 鈥榝ully white-peopled cities,鈥 let us stay all Black fullness when we get there.鈥濃擠ouglas Kearney, author, Sho
鈥淏ook鈥檚 poetry is sonic, sound forward, and unyielding. He wants you to know he鈥檚 Black and he鈥檚 in love with his people. This lyric is fluid; movement is necessary to his meaning. Each line plays on the one before it and flirts with the one that follows. All Black Everything should be read one poem at a time, each one chewed on, absorbed slowly on its own before continuing. . . . It is all music, it is all urgent, every poem is a declaration. Book is here. He is taking up space. And he is not compromising himself to do so.鈥濃Little Village
