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 eraWillie 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, kal...

**A suite of poems about a percussionist in 1970 Spanish Harlem music circles, from the author of The Crazy BunchA National Book Critics Circle 2014 Finalist for Poetry**Through dream song and elegy, alternate takes and tempos, prizewinning poet Willie Perdomo’s third collection crackles with vitality and dynamism as it imagines the life of a percussionist, rebuilding the landscape of his apprenticeship, love, diaspora, and death. At the beginning of his infernal j...

Smoking Lovely's explorations of poetry and the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its self-reflexive and complex exploration of self-and/as-other, and of the simultaneous othering, commodification, and spectacularization of Afro-diasporic bodies and cultural forms.

Winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets L****enore Marshall Poetry PrizeFinalist 2023 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard PrizeBlack Pastoral explores the complex duality of Black peoples’ past and present relationship with nature. It surveys the ways in which our histories (both Black histories and natural/ecological histories), our suffering and our thriving, are forever wound around one another. They are painful at ti...

Texting and emailing have revolutionized the way we communicate, enabling us to be more efficient and stay in touch more easily. But they have also altered the dynamics of some of our most important relationships. Within this new digital communication landscape, what have we lost? Poet Willie Perdomo, author of The Crazy Bunch, shares his humble opinion on how a handwritten letter expresses more than just words.

In the dynamic tradition of the BreakBeat Poets anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT celebrates the embodied narratives of Latinidad. Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space. Like Hip-Hop, we honor what was, what is, and what's next.