The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Poets)

Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixed "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 Eastern 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."