This book belongs in the hands of people whose cultures are misaligned. This book belongs to people whose words overlap, whose minds are many places, who hear a rhythm in every background.
Shane Book’s All Black Everything (University of Iowa Press) is a promise kept. It is an altar to the church that gave him his art.
Book’s poetry is sonic, sound forward and unyielding. He wants you to know he’s Black and he’s 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.
This isn’t how I usually read poetry. I might read five poems at a time and set the book down, but All Black Everything requires attention — begs to be read aloud. Demands to be heard and for its rhythm to be freed from the page.
It’s difficult to say more about this book without excerpting and it’s difficult to excerpt something that builds on itself so deliberately and that folds in on itself by repeated meters and cultural images. In each poem, Book describes a moment and brings his readers to movement through meter and urgency. He alternates between AAVE, writing words phonetically as they’re spoken, and using words I had to look up in the dictionary. This book takes issue with expectations, subverts them and opens itself up to the reader to live in the moment of each poem and become absorbed in by the rhythm of each poem.
Book’s command of language is unparalleled and his interest in my comfort is nonexistent. All Black Everything is what art is supposed to be: Language manipulated to the artist’s demands; the reader at the writer’s mercy.
While it is the linguistic meter and hyper-real imagery that make this collection so special, Book also deftly uses more traditionally beautiful language as in “Juice Juice:” “a fortress can be built / to a bay, a bay dug / up as a fleet of canoes, / planes, even a rubber / tree can curve / like a summer.” In “Going Forward” he describes a specific scene in which “Everything is amped up / is unreal-real everything.” but closes with the most subtle gut-punch, “It takes a muscle / to fall in love.”
I want to be able to do this collection justice. I want to show you Book’s cadence, the magic in verse meant to be heard through headphones. I had to stop myself from looking up video performances because I didn’t want it to color my review. But I can hear him when, in “I Know I’ve Reached Peak Shane,” he says,
Real talk: this run-by-Queen-Victoria / British Empire outpost / of the history of the goddamn / complete world / —opium, Scottish / Presbyterian gangster shit, / the man flavor / profile for toothpaste, incidentally. / What a charge. Hit the past so hard / make it float-wait. I’m not / no Airbnb sucka, / I went to driving school, / drove a plug-in hybrid / sports car by Porsche / in my mind, 918 Spyder / maximum torque insect in my mind, / fastest electric coffin ever maimed.
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.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2024 issue.
