Language Arts Unit

Language Arts Unit approaches rap both as an idea to think through and as a craft to practice, and it keeps returning to how race shapes both the form and the subject of the music. It also considers music as a force that can rally people and as something that can dull them. The book opens with a rambling preface in which the author uses sharp, absurdist humor to weigh how words, sound, and the many meanings that drift around them carry weight in an era of fast, constant information networks.

The main body is the written half of a multimedia project. It collects the lyrics from a long-form album, set down as poems. Readers will notice the deliberate line breaks and the author's distinctive, idiosyncratic wordplay, which turns the page into another place for the sound to happen. The book includes a link for downloading the full album, so the poems can be read alongside the recordings they came from.