A Fortune for Your Disaster

by Hanif Abdurraqib

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It’s a book about a mother’s death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author’s black friends wanted to listen to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor’s dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

Genres: Poetry, Audiobook, Nonfiction, Race, Music, Adult, African American

120 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 2019

About the author

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, and was met with critical acclaim. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Reviews

[chai (thelibrairie on tiktok) ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a perpetual joy to read and reread Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetry. Every time I read his poems, I feel like I’m discovering poetry all over again. This is a collection that utterly dazzles with the furnace heat of it. Abdurraqib’s words have a profound pull and a gutting grace as he writes about intimacy, loss, betrayal, loneliness, survival, and how sometimes the most radical thing you can do is to love through heartbreak. A Fortune for Your Disaster also contains one of my heart-poems, “It Is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent & This Is How We Do It,” which I still can’t read without the overwhelming physical urge to *gnaw* my entire fist. I mean how can you ask me to be normal about:

“there is intimacy in the moment where the eyes of two enemies meet. there is a tenderness in knowing what desire ties you to a person, even if you have spent your dreaming hours cutting them a casket from the tree in their mother's front yard. it is a blessing to know someone wants a funeral for you.”

and “i suppose there is also intimacy in the moment when a lover becomes an enemy, though it is tougher to say when it happens. probably when there is a song you can’t remember them living inside of anymore, even if both of you curled your lips around the words in a car at some impossible hour of morning, driving away from the place you met. i like my agony threaded together by the same chorus. not everything is Sisyphean. no one ever wants to imagine themselves as the boulder.”

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hanif Abdurraqib writes in a way that lifts me up and completely breaks me all in the same poem. The good kind of hurt though, the kind that reminds you that you are human and that although you must die you are still alive. It's the kind of whirlwind of emotions that are likely the sort of breakdown exhaustion in which people made the maxim about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, the sort of break up that leaves you wounded but ready to dive into life the way Abdurraqib writes in his essay On Summer Crushing about how ‘my heart could be tugged in any direction it pleased.’ His second collection, A Fortune For Your Disaster, is punch after punch, page after page of heartfelt heartache and exuberance. With a prose that arrives rapid fire on the page and with a rhythmic musicality to accompany the many music references it delivers (the title, for instance, is taken from the Fall Out Boy song Don’t You Know Who I Think I Am?), even in the moments of sorrow the words embrace your heart in their sublimity. ‘The poem begins not where the knife enters but where the blade twists,’ Abdurraqib writes and with every twist of his poetic blade I can only say, thank you please may I have another. I mean, just read this:

IT IS ONCE AGAIN THE SUMMER OF MY DISCONTENT AND THIS IS HOW WE DO IT

Is creeping out of some open window same way it was in the summer of '95 when my heartbreak was a different animal howling at the same clouds and the cops broke up the block party at franklin park right before the song hit the last verse because someone from the right hood locked eyes with someone from the wrong one and me and my boys ran into the corner store and tucked the chocolate bars into the humid caverns of our pants pockets and later licked the melted chocolate from its sterling wrappers in the woods behind mario's crib with the girls we liked too much to want to know if they liked us back and there it was, the summer I learned to kiss the air and imagine it bending into a mouth and here it is again, the summer everything outside I love is melting and I tell my boys there is a reason songs from the 90s are having a revival and it's because the heart and tongue are the muscles with the most irresistible histories and I'm kind of buzzed. I'm kind of buzzing. I'm kind of a hive with no begging and hollow cavities. There is intimacy in the moment where the eyes of two enemies meet. There is a tenderness in knowing what desire ties you to a person, even if you have spent your dreaming hours cutting them a casket from the tree in their mother's front yard. It is a blessing to know someone wants a funeral for you. A coming together of your people from their faraway corners to tell some story about your thefts and triumphs. All of your better selves shaking their heads over a table, chocolate staining their teeth. I suppose there is also intimacy in the moment where a lover becomes an enemy, though it is tough to say when it happens. probably when there is a song you can't remember them living inside of anymore, even if both of you curled your lips around the words in a car at some impossible hour of morning, driving away from the place you met. I like my agony threaded together by the same chorus. Not everything is sisyphean. No one ever wants to imagine themselves as the boulder.

In this collection ‘there is always a darkness asking to be split open,’ as we move through love, loss and the daily aches of living. ‘That which forces us to bear our teeth is all a matter of perspective,’ he tells us and across A Fortune For Your Disaster we find poems that arrive with teeth beared to the grit of the world but also a tender and vulnerable heart asking to fill the world with love. There is a playfulness to the pain, however, and reflections on the ghost of Marvin Gay or the regrets of Nikola Tesla—two “narratives” that eventually meet for a rather powerful poetic climax—or accessing memory and emotion riding the high of a song’s catchy chorus keep the collection from feeling overburdened by heaviness. Sure, we have lines that cut deep and open old wounds of loneliness like ‘tonight / I will watch the stars rust / in the arms of no one / turns out / daylight is the new / misery’ but something I really love about Abdurraqib is he will totally write you a Radiohead poem. The beat of Idioteque pulsates your brain while reading Women and Children First and the Children First and the Children and while it might not make you ‘laugh / until / my head / comes off,’ lines like ‘in Ohio the stars sink their fangs into the neck of the night sky & I am not afraid’ slap in a way that makes you feel feel like your cheek should sting for an hour. Hurt me some more, Hanif.

enough with the foolishness of hope and how it bruises
the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love
with the idea of staying. if one must pray, i imagine
it is most worthwhile to pray towards endings.’
—from it's not like nikola tesla knew all of those people were going to die

How can you not love a guy who writes poems that read ‘This is a poem about the night that every pizza place in New Haven ran out of cheese and also about the dissolution of a marriage.’ Honestly, that is the best description of his work in general. And while it can reach real heavy emotional hits, with many of the poems bruised and bewildered in the face of the harshness thrown at us by each other, there is still a hope that refuses to be silent in the face of it all. ‘There is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into.’ May we all find that sweetness.

‘Everybody wanna make soul but don’t nobody wanna chew a hole through the night small enough for a bullet to pass through & pull each of their lovers into it.’

Hanif Abdurraqib has an incredible gift to write essays and poetry in equal measure of eloquence and A Fortune For Your Disaster is another great example of his brilliance. A marvelous read.

4.5/5

‘I want, mostly, a year that will not kill me when it is over.’

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

. . .there is always a darkness asking to be split open.

When my father died unexpectedly in 2014, a nearby cyclone caught wind of my disaster and descended upon me to make sure that my decimation was full and complete.

I kept relying on that old saying, you know the one. . . that bad things come in threes, but someone clearly did the math wrong, because it was more like thirty.

I've been in a shit storm that I hope will be ending this year, because they also say that cycles occur in patterns of seven.

Let's hope that this saying is right, and that seven's the magical number for me.

I think Hanif Adburraqib's hoping for the same thing. I'm not sure if his disaster began with the death of his mother or the devastation of divorce, but I do know. . .

He misses his mom:

tonight I want a meal
I could have made
in my own kitchen
with my mother's arms
over my shoulders

He's lonely as hell:

tonight I want no love
that doesn't crumble
and stain every part of me
. . .
tonight
I will watch the stars rust
in the arms of no one
turns out
daylight is the new
misery

He is both pragmatic and despondent over the loss of love:

Enough of the foolishness of hope and how it bruises
the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love
with the idea of staying. If one must pray, I imagine
it is most worthwhile to pray toward endings.

And he's a lusty man who's been burned by loss. You can feel his simultaneous fight for life and a desire to succumb to death:

I most cherish how the headboard
whispers under
the right rhythm
how it sounds like two ropes
lowering a fresh
casket
into another
dark & wet
mouth.

I have never encountered a poetry collection like this before. Some of it rambles, some of it strikes like bullets. Consider me terribly anxious to read more of his work. Also consider me unafraid of what happiness and ease might do to Mr. Abdurraqib's poetry (and, frankly, my own).

there is a sky
to be pulled down
into our bowls
there is a sweetness for us
to push our faces into

[Glennys Egan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This is a poem about the night that every pizza place in New Haven ran out of cheese and also about the dissolution of a marriage.” HANIF REALLY DID THAT, GIVE THIS MAN A PULITZER.

Really tho. Highly recommend the audiobook, which he reads himself, so you can hear the stories behind some of the poems. This is a beautiful collection I know I will return to.

[chantel nouseforaname · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unique, filled with heartache and various ups and downs told through a few perspectives; most notably the perspective of Marvin Gaye. I love Hanif's writing style. It's reflective, pensive, at times comical, sometimes aggressive and super inquisitive. You get intense feels going through all the questions/reflections he has to ask his departed lover; all the questions about why/how we still exist after trauma, heartache, death, loss of relationship and friendships.

There was just something about the work; although it was good, I felt like some shit got held back through his use of various writing styles and voices. The truth of what he was saying felt cloaked to me in a bunch of shit at times. I felt like - I read his other work They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us and it was so raw and just potent. I read Go Ahead In The Rain and it was litty. I want to read The Crown Ain't Worth Much and Vintage Sadness, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Anyway, I'm no scholar or poetry elitist by any measure, I'm just a bitch who knows what I like personally and I felt like some of this was unnecessarily cloaked up in the illustrated mentality of Marvin Gaye and the seeming guilt of Nikola Tesla when it felt like all Hanif wanted to say was "this is shitty, no one cares about me or the world because they're too focused on their debauchery and maybe, just maybe, I would have done things differently."

I enjoyed it but was it my favourite? Nah.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most poetry books are what we call them, “collections.” They may have a uniting theme or several, but this book reaches a higher bar of cohesion and organization. Abdurraqib does collect contrasting elements of his life: street smarts, life in the hood, trials of being an African American, and stirs them up with erudition from his literary craft to a series of poems about Tesla and mentions of mythology: “not everything is Sisyphean, no one ever wants to imagine themselves as the boulder” ( from “It Is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent & This Is How We Do It”). It is the recurring topics that most impressed me, especially “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This.” That isn’t the title of a poem, but the title of 13 different poems. I was delighted by the refrain. Most poets would have titled the book that. He reminds us that finding the beauty in life and celebrating the everyday is a constant struggle.

Other repeated elements are “The Ghost of Marvin Gaye…” followed by a present tense verb, and Tesla. My favorite Tesla title is “It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All Those People Were Going to Die.” The poet has a gift for quirky, intriguing titles that are often lead ins to the poem. My favorite title and poem is “Watching a Fight at the New Haven Dog Park, First Two Dogs and Then Their Owners.” It begins

“The mailman still hands me bills like I should feel lucky to have my name on anything in this town & / I been here 14 months & all I get is paper telling me who I owe and when I owe & what might be / taken from me if I don’t hand over the faces of dead men…”

But sometimes “a walk in the park” isn’t what the cliché promises. After witnessing the dog and owner contest he heads home because

“…I really don’t have time for all the theater at this dog park & I am getting too old & I / want only a good dog most days & I’m saying I want a dog that will never ask me to finish something / it started & I’m saying I want a dog that will never make me clean its blood out of the streets.”

I looked Hanif Abdurraqib up on You Tube to hear how to pronounce his name. I guessed right, but I recommend that you check out some of his readings there. He’s an excellent presenter.

[literaryelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

“the poem begins not where the knife enters but where the blade twists”

“A person only gets to be called a widow once, and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.”

“Forgive me, for I have been nurturing my well-work grudges against beauty”

It is a fact universally acknowledged that if Hanif writes it, I will read it. Third time reading and it just gets better everytime. I love this collection so, so much. Highly, highly recommend the audiobook!

~~

“I want, mostly, a year that will not kill me when it is over.”

Amazing!!! Loved this poetry collection.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

hanif abdurraqib's new collection of poetry, a fortune for your disaster is an emotionally-stirring and deeply personal work of grief, sorrow, loss, self-reflection, remembrance, violence, love, death, and heartbreak (romantic and otherwise). the polymathic author casts a wide net, but his precise and unabashed imagery commands an unflinching gaze. with his trademark interpolation of popular culture, hanif's poems can stir your heart almost as easily as they can stop it. an obviously gifted and candid writer, hanif's poetry (as well as his prose) maps the connections between the forgotten and the unforgettable. a fortune for your disaster is gritty and graceful, piercing and profound.

it's not like nikola tesla knew all of those people were going to die

everyone wants to write about god
but no one wants to imagine their god

as the finger trembling inside a grenade
pin's ring or the red vine of blood coughed into a child's palm

while they cradle the head of a dying parent.
few things are more dangerous than a man

who is capable of dividing himself into several men,
each of them with a unique river of desire

on their tongues. it is also magic to pray for a daughter
and find yourself with an endless march of boys

who all have the smile of a motherfucker who wronged you
and never apologized. no one wants to imagine their god

as the knuckles cracking on a father watching their son
picking a good switch from the tree and certainly

no one wants to imagine their god as the tree.
enough with the foolishness of hope and how it bruises

the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love
with the idea of staying. if one must pray, i imagine

it is most worthwhile to pray towards endings.
the only difference between sunsets and funerals

is whether or not a town mistakes the howls
of a crying woman for madness.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

First I read it through. Then I re-read all the poems with the title "How Can Black People Write About Flowers At a Time Like This" (I counted 12). Then I re-read all the poems with "The Ghost of Marvin Gaye" in the title (7). Then I re-read all the poems with the title "It's Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All Those People Were Going to Die" (3). Then I re-read the two poems entitled "I Tend to Think Forgiveness Looks the Way It Does in the Movies." Then I re-read all the poems that had non-repeating titles, only this time from the back to the front (I don't know why I did it that way). There are also two (or maybe three) poems entitled "The Prestige" which open and close the book, so I read those a bunch of times as well. I got this book from the library, but I may have to go buy a copy so I can keep reading it whenever I want to. The author is from Columbus, Ohio, but I haven't met him yet. Somehow his readings always seem to happen when I'm out of town. Hope that won't keep happening, as I'd like to hear him read these!

[chasc.taylor_reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had Hanif Abdurraqib’s grocery list, I’d read that too 😂😂. I absolutely love this work!

A Fortune for Your Disaster is a collection of poems about transitions. There’s discussions of death of a parent, divorce, relocating, etc. The pain and grief is palpable through the words. I love that the author narrates this audiobook, because 1) he does an excellent job and 2) there are brief moments when he addresses the reader and explains the inspiration behind the poems in that section. I read this in tandem (audiobook and physical book) because there are some stylistic things that are fun to see with your eyes (plus I ALWAYS annotate this authors books).

[Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant … proper review to follow.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a ton of this that I didn't understand (which is usually the case for me with poetry) but I still really enjoyed it! Lots of beautiful poems about heartbreak, love, loss, friendship, and a whole lot more. Really liked the ones titled How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This? The Nikola Tesla ones I didn't get at all. I loved talking through some of these poems with book club and look forward to returning to them!

[Anna Levitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

who knew that someone could write a book about two Hugh Jackman movies and it would be gorgeous

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each poem held me in its thrall. Hanif Abdurraqib writes from the soul and has a beautiful way with words that caused me to stay absolutely still in the moment and experience a depth of feeling. I loved becoming immersed in his creation.

The book is divided into three sections: THE PLEDGE, THE TURN, and THE PRESTIGE. These are the poems that held me the tightest:

THE PLEDGE:
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This
It's Not Like Nicola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die
It is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off

THE TURN:
None of My Vices are Violent Enough to Undo Remembering
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This

THE PRESTIGE:
None of My Friends Want to Listen to Don't Stop Believing
What a Miracle That Our Parents Had Us When They Could Have Gotten a Puppy Instead
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This

Some favorite lines From: None of My Friends Want to Listen to Don't Stop Believing

"I want to dance in the moments before the sunset lets me out of its clutches & fear carves a crib into the pit of some mother's stomach." [...]

"hold on to that feeling & the wind might blow the shadow of someone you miss through your outstretched fingers."

[Jolene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guys, in like 2014, a colleague at my new workplace asked me to name my favorite movie, and the first thing that popped into my head and out of my mouth was The Prestige ...about the magicians. It did not go over well. I definitely got teased about it for months to come. ("Whose favorite movie is The Prestige???")

Well, here's Hanif Abdurraqib making The Prestige into poetry, and I feel so validated. He likes emo music, too, and Florence Welch and dogs and ordering takeout, and I wish I could be his friend.

I know, I know. Most people like most of those things. But we don't always think of poets as people. Poets can feel somehow separate from the rest of us, especially to high school students who have pretty much only ever read about Dickinson's birds and William Carlos Williams's wheelbarrow.

And white people especially (even white TEACHERS) struggle to see Black poets/writers AS full people rather than as vessels to teach us about Blackness or about racism. On yesterday's episode of Slate Culture Gabfest, Lauren Michele Jackson, English professor and author of White Negroes, talks about white people's misguided attempts to learn about race from literature, specifically literature that centers on Black trauma. This is something we talk a lot about at OPRFHS, too. Which texts can we choose that center on BIPOC protagonists without also centering on oppression?

A Fortune for Your Disaster explores racism and violence but also discusses Michael Jordan and flowers and Marvin Gaye and "Don't Stop Believin'" and pizza. And, of course, The Prestige. The flower motifs and allusions to the Nolan movie are especially brilliant and "literary" in a way that makes me want to bring this collection into my classroom.

Importantly, what is perhaps the central question in this collection really speaks to our current moment: How do we find and think about and talk about joy when everything feels so terrible? I'm not sure that Abdurraqib answers this question, but by pointing to the beauty in his own day-to-day, he insists that this balance is worth thinking about.

Favorites:
- The series of poems called "How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This," especially the one about dandelions (4) and the one one about orchids (60-61)
- "It Is Maybe Time to Admit that Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off" (25)
- "Glamour on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything" (26) (You can read or listen to an excerpt here)

From "It Is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent and This Is How We Do It:"
"i suppose there is also intimacy in the moment when a lover becomes an enemy, though it is tougher to say when it happens, probably when there is a song you can't remember them living inside of anymore, even if both of you curled your lips around the words in a car at some impossible hour of morning, driving away from the place you met. i like my agony threaded together by the same chorus. not everything is Sisyphean. no one wants to imagine themselves as the boulder" (3).

[Hannah (hngisreading) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems about loss, grief, surviving.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved this, but I also found myself not understanding several of the poems. This is most likely an issue with myself as a not very experienced poetry reader. It was lyrical and beautiful and I will return to it. Hopefully with a better understanding or someone to help me process the work more thoroughly.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm kind of at a loss as to how to rate this. Or even what I thought of it. I had previously listened to Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, but ended up DNF'ing it. But on the 'Gram, a guy that I follow really highly recommends Abdurraqib and so I decided to give him another shot.

I chose poorly, I think. So I think I owe yet another do-over.

Poetry just isn't my jam. It is absolutely Abdurraqib's jam, and it fits his style like a glove, but I'm like a colorblind person staring at Van Gogh's 'Poppies'. I can tell it is art, but it's impossible for me to properly appreciate.

What I did enjoy though, is Abdurraqib reading this himself, and especially the little asides he included to introduce various themes and concepts he employed in his writing. It was very striking to me how different these sections were. He was almost shy, hesitant, awkward during these little intros, but then the poetry read was confident and powerful.

This was quite short - it took me a little over an hour to listen to. And... it was fine. Insightful and unique, but the format just doesn't work for me.

[C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful and brilliant poetry collection. The author’s gift is evident, but Beware that the poet curses and in some poems frequently uses the N word. It’s hard to rate this anything less than 5 star, my only issues are his use of vocabulary that I find offensive. Perhaps that in itself is what the poet is trying to invoke? It’s a collection that I would listen to again.

[Ebony (EKG) · Rating 5 out of 5]

the audiobook of this was fantastic!!! officially a hanif stan!!! buying the physical copy asap

some lines that stuck out to me while listening:

“loneliness is another type of debt”
“a mercy i cannot touch”

[Emm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not typically one for audiobooks, but there's something so beautifully personal and intimate in Hanif's delivery. I can't say that I fully grasped the meaning of every poem, but his writing still moves me in ways that no other author has ever come close to.

A few of my favourite quotes:

“the poem begins not where the knife enters but where the blade twists.”

"there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten."

"hold on to that feeling & the wind might blow the shadow of someone you miss through your outstretched fingers. I don’t know anymore what it is we are all reaching for, but here we are."

"Forgive me, for I have been nurturing my well-worn grudges against beauty."

"into the hollow void I’ve left / I echo the names of all who have pulled me / from the depths of my own design. / and underneath the known haunting / is invented darkness, I promise you / it isn’t all that bad. we can all mourn / until the mourning trembles out a celebration"

[Grace W · Rating 5 out of 5]

(c/p from my review on TheStoryGraph) Oh WOW WOW WOW!!!! This book of poetry is SO GOOD! I have so much to love about it. I borrowed it from the library but I think I might have to own it because it just absolutely blew me away! I loved the reoccurring themes, the reoccurring titles, the way the poems weaved in and out of each other. It's so good! I adore it

TW for this book include: Racial slurs, Racism, Greif, Death.

[Hannah Showalter · Rating 5 out of 5]

literally no one is doing it like hanif is, literally no one. so so good in a way that leaves me speechless. also, listened to the audiobook for this one, which was such a cool reading experience! loved hearing some back story on the poems before he read them.

[Frida · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5.

I'm still fresh on Hanif's approach to poetry, though I really enjoyed quite a few of these — "It Is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent & This Is How We Do It," "Watching A Fight At the New Haven Dog Park, First Two Dogs and Then Their Owners," "The Ghost of Marvin Gaye Plays the Dozens With the Pop Charts," "I Tend to Think Forgiveness Looks the Way It Does In Movies," and "Welcome to Heartbreak."

I love the way Hanif leans into the experience of heartbreak, death, and mourning, and how perceptive he is of his surroundings and how meaning can be drawn from even banal happenings of the day ("Watching A Fight," for example, illustrates this with haunting detail). Collectively, however, I wasn't entirely taken with the poems here. Hanif has a charming style, that's for certain, but there seemed to be a lack of congruence.

Thanks, Tin House, for supplying me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Kokie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will one ever be "done" reading poetry like this? I'm still reeling.

It is, at once, completely readable, nothing short of genius, and deeper than I think I have the capacity to understand at any given moment. The way Abdurraqib fashions words together and carefully sets them on the page is a thing of pure beauty.

I want to start my *first* re-read now. To try to understand better the man behind the words. To fall again for the music of his phrases. To see him spark his magic.

[bella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hanif Abdurraqib has rapidly become one of my favorite writers. This poetry collection drew me in with his characteristic heartfelt warmth and vulnerability. The poems grapple with heartbreak, loss, forgiveness, loneliness. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook for my reread, hearing the melodic words flow in the author’s own voice.

[Tiana Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

breathless

[Kevin Krein · Rating 5 out of 5]

there were phrasings and ideas in this book that absolutely devastated me; more than any book should.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

None of my Black Friends Want to Listen to Don't Stop Believin'

but we all know what it is when the street / light comes on
& I don't mean to romanticize darkness but I do perhaps mean to say
I want to dance in the moments before the sunset lets me out
of its clutches & fear carves a crib into the pit
of some mother's stomach. the news says that soon
it's going to feel like summer all year & then what
will we make of winter & the way nighttime gallops in
before our bodies are ready to lie down with each other
& I know. I hear you thinking there he goes again.
But let me promise you that this time it really is just about a song
& the coins rattling in my pocket & the way they beg to be pushed
into a jukebox when the sky is a color that demands singing
& nothing else. But if you will indulge me--since you are
still here--I will say the words.

hold on to that feeling & the wind might blow the shadow
of someone you miss through your outstretched fingers.
I don't know anymore what it is we are all reaching for, but here
we are & somewhere along the line we learned the difference
between the gospel that will keep us out of hell & the shit they play
to wake up the polo shirts in suburban pews & I say we & you already know
I mean those of us who have reached for a song & pulled back a coffin
& we don't sing our gospel in bars. We don't sing where we sin.
We don't lock arms and wake up a hood that ain't ours,
where they call the cops if a leaf rattles outside a window past midnight
& this is why I hang back under the flickering street / light
& listen to the hum of rusting air conditioners buzzing in late November
& maybe all the songs we don't want to sing out loud anymore
are about someone on a porch, wringing their hands together
& hoping a person who shares their blood cuts
through the night & walks into their arms.

Hanif Abdurraqib's A Fortune for Your Disaster is an excellent collection highlighting his voicing and craft as a poet. Many of these poems take a while to digest, require rumination before the inevitable lightbulb--whether rational or emotional--clicks on. This is an excellent collection I recommend to anyone wishing to read "contemporary poetry."

I will also add that Abdurraqib is on YouTube reading his poetry or being interviewed. He is an impressive speaker as well.

Check it out.

It's Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die

if man is not supposed to play
God then
why did God make dying look
so beautiful.
I guess there were no bullets
& so the nails
had to suffice & in defense
of lightning
there is always darkness
asking to be
split open. as a boy, I saw an
electric tongue
dance along the oak tree
outside my window
& the two halves held
themselves together
by three wooden threads
for years & I grew
to imagine them as hands
nailed to each
other & I may have once
whispered I want
a love like that into the empty
space--severed but
forgiving. don't you know
they bury men
like me alive with all of our
sentimental longing.
Tesla said there are no great
inventions made by
married men but then how
do you explain
the way the space in between
bodies in a shared
bed can feel like an entire
country? I'm saying
that all inventions come
at the cost of a room
becoming something
different than it was.
a boy who imagines himself
alone falls from an abandoned
skyscraper & halves the sky
& there is nothing up there
that will hold any of us
together & darling I think
I've got it--I can tell
Magic from science by
whether or not
there is a body
in the casket.