This book is the first published collection of his work.
Edited by his mother, the artist Lajuana Lampkins, Collected Works is a searing, sprawling document of Chicago in the 2000s.
Akbar takes the reader from the halls of his alma mater, Columbia College, where he rose to win poetry competitions, to the stage of the Metro, where he performed for Russell Simmons as a Def Poet.
The book contains love poems written at the Green Mill, were he was a popular performer in its mid-2000s heyday, and essays about being caught in a gang war in the violent Chicago summer of 2008.
Much of this material was first published as moment-by moment blog posts that have disappeared from the Internet. They are collected here for the first time, recovered from printouts saved by Lampkins in her cell at the Dwight Correctional Center. Lampkins spent 30 years there for a crime she did not commit.
Akbar writes in first-person elation on election night in November 2008, and the electricity of watching Barack Obama ascend from Chicago to the White House.
Poems and letters to his mother recount with brutal honesty his observations of drug deals in his neighborhood and the affects of prescribed antipsychotic drugs on his own mind and body while “embedded in a psych ward”.
Akbar’s insights flow from his experiences at Maryville Academy, Trinity United Church of Christ, and Mosque Maryam. From Harold’s Chicken on the South Side to the AMC Theater on Michigan Avenue to the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, this book is an essential document of our city from a seminal time that shouldn’t be lost.
