EVERYTHING AND NOTHING AT ONCE

Essays that circle out from the experience of a Brooklyn-based writer to explore the ramifications of living as a Black man in contemporary America.

Raised by an Afro-Caribbean mother who worked hard as a nurse, and now the committed father of two young daughters, Leon, a creative director at the New York Times’ T Brand Studio, “wanted to write a book that examined the spectrum of Black masculinity with language that didn’t feel linear, or like a copy and paste....I aim to tear apart, to pick, to probe, and to ponder.” Deeply immersed in hip-hop—he initially intended to make a living as a rapper—Leon name-drops hip-hop artists with abandon and often without elaboration, which may leave readers without his knowledge adrift, even as they appreciate his energetic prose. Because his style is free flowing, almost stream of consciousness (“I write essays like I write raps”), the author is less effective in essays that call for more tightly reasoned arguments. “Good Art, Bad Art, Black Art” bogs down in truisms like, “Blackness is not considered the norm. Whiteness is.” Leon is at his best when he anchors the essays to the details of his own life and allows his natural, quirky sense of humor free rein. In the relatively succinct, slyly comic “Belly,” the author meditates on his ambivalence about his body. Over the course of this memorable essay, he describes a history that includes snacking on fried chicken after a long day of work, single fatherhood, remarks about his belly from lovers pleased and displeased by it, and camping in front of the TV eating the pizza his mostly absentee father occasionally provided if he “wasn't drunk or hadn't spent his own SSI check at whichever bar he fell asleep at or around.”

A sensitive, entertaining, insightful, sometimes verbose collection.