Hooligan Shit

Aaliyah Daniels

From Sunset Press, DESC HERE

Published in the Spring 2023 Collection.

“Hooligan Shit is a Hunts Point bildungsroman. Childhood friends navigate myriad violences, generational, racial, street, sexual, and not everyone makes it out whole. But in spite of it all, this is a celebration of life beyond survival-mode for a young African-American woman, haunted but able to 'take up all the space she wants.' This collection of poems and micro-essays shows us how to dance on a knife’s edge. Aaliyah Daniels is a necessary new voice."

ANDREW GRACE
"Through a fluent & dexterous exhibition of poetry & prose this chapbook sings a cinema in dedication to her people, much in line with Margaret Walker & Danez Smith. This is a true New York blues, elegy, & ode to the homies, the first Gods, the riders. Daniels puts forth a bildungsroman for the hooligan, a figure, outside of this text, often relegated to rules, gets held & loved in all their unruliness. We are entrenched in culture through the speaker's purview, from songs that support the lyrical weaving of an intergenerational coming of age story, to the rottweilers of DMX, to the chic Shego of Kim Possible, Aaliyah’s debut is a love story centering those that systems name pariah. Instead of being outsiders, or taboos, Daniels’ writing brings them all into this work, calls them home with complexity, & crowns them siblings in survival."

NABILA LOVELACE

Overgrowth | Spring 2023