The Crazy Bunch

Summary

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). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood with a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a “crew” coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s, re-creating a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events when “we all tried to fly, but only one of us succeeded.”

“The Crazy Bunch is a miracle and a gift. An ars poetica that ‘belly-sings the ambrosial hour’ of an unforgettable crew. Street sonnets, gangsta ghazals, and Boricua blues stanzas face interrogation by the Poetry Cops, but these poems bust free. ‘Who you again?’ Don’t bring your dictionary; Willie Perdomo rewrote the damn thing.”—Evie Shockley