“And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers. I want us to find each other among the forest of writhing and make a deal. Okay, lover. It is just us now. The only way out is through.”

This is a collection of essays written by a poet, and it shows. In a good way. This book is perfection. I finished it and immediately wanted to reread it. I listened to it on audiobook and halfway through decided I needed a physical copy. 

Each essay in this collection celebrates Black performance while dancing between subjects and personal stories in a way that might have been chaotic in lesser hands but is captivating when done by Abdurraqib. 

There’s “This One Goes Out to All the Magical Negroes” which deftly pirouettes between discussions of The Lion King, the album Diplomatic Immunity, Dave Chappell, and the 1920s Black magician Ellen Armstrong. 

There’s “16 Ways of Looking at Blackface” which looks at  the paradox of Charles Dickens’ complicated racial politics and his relationship with and writings about the Black dancer William Henry Lane (Master Juba). It discusses white people pretending to be Black on the internet, the epic dance battles of the 1840s between Master Juba and the white minstrel dancer John Diamond, Black skincare routines, and white kids donning blackface at college parties.

In “On the Certain and Uncertain Movements of Limbs” Abdurraqib discusses code-switching as a child, the Cosby Show, Whitney Houston, and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 

It’s also worth noting that the audiobook is narrated by JD Jackson who is one of my all time favorite narrators. He does such a fantastic job. When I think about this book, I think about his voice.