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About The Crazy Bunch
Product Description 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." Review Praise for The Crazy Bunch: "This immersive poetry collection proceeds like a mixtape or a gnostic gospel . . . Oracular, intoxicating . . . Perdomo’s vibrant diction refashions the high lyric, drawing on local cant to render the intimacy of home, friendship, and shared loss. Part rhapsody, part elegy, the book memorializes neighborhood legends, and, even as it impishly indulges nostalgic romance, it never forgets, or forgives, the violence that threatens these young lives." —The New Yorker "The truculent verses of Harlem-bred Nuyorican poet Willie Perdomo embody a revolution of identity . . . with tight texts that evoke . . . urban angst and strong doses of collective love. . . a kind of prophecy of the transnational, intersectional times we live in." —Ed Morales, The Washington Post "The poems all swell with Perdomo’s natural gift of lyricism . . . a story about rap is also distinctly a story about friendship . . . [and] about loss, or about the people who didn’t make it, and the people who did. The Crazy Bunch manages to carry all of these things at once and give them equal weight." —Hanif Abdurraqib, 4Columns.org "Set during one weekend in the early 1990s, Perdomo's fourth book celebrates a crew of hip-hop-loving friends in East Harlem with his customary heart and bravura language." — The New York Times Book Review "Moving between paean and elegy with incredible verve, these poems, full of affection and nostalgia, also memorialize moments of violence and loss . . . Pushing the notion of documentary poetics in addressing street violence, police brutality, and suicide, Perdomo invites the voices from his childhood to reveal themselves and their complexities in vividly rendered speech." —Poets.org "Within the vivid language in this poetic bildungsroman, we are given back doorway into the very real poetic imaginary of crews that carry secrets to the death. This is not poetry about a world; this is a world that lives and speaks in poetry because there is no other way to decipher it or survive it . . . All the words dance on the pages of The Crazy Bunch." —Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta, A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine "This savage, funny, and lyrical hymn speaks to Perdomo’s formative years in East Harlem." —The New York Public Library, "Best Books of 2019" "An energetic musicality of language is on full display, electrifying every exchange . . . If 'We Real Cool,' the iconic eight-line poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, had bloomed into a full-length collection, it might be The Crazy Bunch." —Book Page "New York-born Puerto Rican poet Perdomo has been widely recognized for his streetwise lyrics and crackling depictions of life in NYC at the turn of the twenty-first century. In this collection of witty dialogue, fast couplets, and hip jargon, Perdomo immerses readers in his native East Harlem of the 1990s . . . Perdomo's colloquial, storytelling style is in full effect, replete with nostalgic recollections of childhood haunts, striking in their simplicity. The result is both a whirlwind of colorful rhythms and an enduring portrait of tight-knit friends suffering through loss. [Perdomo is] a talented wordsmith
