“Abdul Ali’s Trouble Sleeping awakens the mind. Like the guts of a marvelous timepiece, the incremental details tick with merciless accuracy and timeless certainty. Urban, gutsy, each poem exposes the conflicts of an inner-city speaker. Yet even in the midst of conflict one believes the voice saying, ‘I love the city.’ Here, popular culture converges…

“This book is an open book. There is no lying in it, no sleep in reading it, no hiding from the person or the place it comes from. The poems are deeply steeped in the African American experience and a tradition I would trace to Langston Hughes and Washington, D.C. where buses are good places…