Crazy Bunch

From a prize-winning poet, a new collection that chronicles a day 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 Spanish Harlem, has won praise as a hip, sly, 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 goes back to his roots 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 long couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo follows a group of young people over twenty-four hours on a hot July day as they deal with the death of one of their friends: "That was the summer we all tried to fly. All but one of us succeeded."