You can tell that Sean Enfield is a musician and poet. It’s clear by the way he riffs with form in his debut essay collection, which explores the condition of burnout, particularly among educators within the American education system. The fourteen essays, some of which started as poems, take different approaches narrating Enfield’s experiences as a first-year teacher at a private North Texas middle school serving Muslim students. Woven throughout are Enfield’s personal reflections from his own school days, growing up biracial in Dallas, Texas. 

“To Pimp a Mockingbird – A Lesson Plan,” about using rap lyrics to “jazz up the material a bit, give it a beat,” takes the form of an actual lesson plan. Overview, objective, required materials, instructional plan, and reflection. He includes all the staid elements to underline his point, that the established system needs some zhuzhing, it needs some new stories held side-by-side with the old, that “there is work to be done to combat the silences.” 

In “Paper Shackles,” the author remembers a history lesson as a preteen. He and his all-white classmates are tasked with making and decorating paper shackles, which they would then wear in paper boats to learn about the Middle Passage. When the teacher asks the class to imagine what it would have been like, his imagination spins. “As we sat, aligned in rows of two in the interior of the boat, I felt the sun beat against my flesh. I knew it would make me darker. Would make me all the more different from my classmates.”

There are essays in the collection dedicated to Prince, Frank Ocean, and Enfield’s beloved punk music. “God Is a Moshpit” uses alternating left and right justified paragraphs to evoke the frenzied back and forth instability of dancing at a punk show. He says, “I came to mosh pits in search of bodies who stumbled as gracelessly as mine.” That moshing serves as metaphor to explore his back and forth with Christian faith, as well as with a racially imbalanced America.

Enfield admits that several of the pieces in HAB! began as poems. “Teacher, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” about the theory-practice learning model, is one of these.  Another of my favorite pieces initiated as a journal-like post on Facebook. A flash essay, “The Drop Off” is just that – a break or drop in the anger built up in previous essays, such as “All My Niggas Was white – Notes from the Color Line” and “To Be (or not to be) in a Rage Almost All the Time – An Essay in Five Acts.” But even when Enfield is justifiably raging, he offers reflection, hope, and grace. “The Drop Off” has all this and the vivid, poignant imagery of children (including a 6-year-old Enfield) at play. He describes it as “collapsing the distance between my childhood self and my students by way of the development of our understanding of the world.” 

This book is one man’s attempt to create an antidote to burnout, using the power of language to find inspiration and hope in an ever-wobbling world. In seeking to claim space for himself in that wobble and to pursue the question, “What do we do with a history we’d rather forget?,” Sean Enfield creates a sharp, intimate work of literary art. The riffs and questions therein are only the beginning. From the mouth of one of his middle school students: “It isn’t over yet, dummy.”