Reading
Poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib, and writer and oral historian Gillian McCain both make their work at the crowded, noisy, and very often wild intersection of spoken word, music, subculture, and investigative poetry. With a punk dedication to challenging the world as it is as a way to imagine it otherwise, Abdurraqib’s work explores the community, both vitalizing and impermanent, that is formed around loving a band, a poem, a sound, and your friends. And with an investigative journalist’s commitment to getting to the bottom of the story, McCain, with her collaborator Legs McNeil, tells the tales of their interview subjects by weaving them into a kaleidoscopic narrative, resulting in a kind of multi-layered non fiction novel that is full of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and in the case of their new book, cultural history and crime.