A Fortune for Your Disaster

It’s brilliant and dizzying, but no matter how lost you get within its powerful lines, you’ll finish this book having a stronger sense of orientation within this world, and within yourself.—NYLON

The fast-rising Ohio music journalist’s second book of poems imports characters from, and jokes about, pop, rap, rock and soul … to animate his corrosively serious, hard-to-forget, lines about love, sex, hypocrisy, self-discovery, power, grief and violence.—the New York Times

This resonant second collection from cultural critic, essayist, and poet Abdurraqib grapples with physical and emotional acts of violence and their political context. —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

There’s real energy in this book, and there’s also a compelling sense of love, longing, and loss. … A deft collection.—The Millions

Devastatingly beautiful … a book born of blood, of heartache, of isolation, of history, of forging new paths and new endings. … a rare accomplishment of poetic language, of music, of heart, of resilience.—Nashville Review

What Abdurraqib has built here is a dazzling tapestry of poems.—American Microreviews & Interviews

This is the kind of poetic stand that helps us stay alive, even in our late empire that moves to its own truth and dread. Abdurraqib is the voice to live with.—Ilya Kaminsky

A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues of music and police uniforms, prayer and swagger, Kehinde Wiley paintings and too many funerals, the streets of bleak cities and the fraught histories of “a kill or be killed / nation.” The disaster is not us or ours but what we endure, forced and as a matter of course, whether our presence is acknowledged or not, on our terms or not. As death insists on invading our lives, we keep making more and more beauty in order to survive it. If “memory is a field / with endless graves” as disasters of the past bleed relentlessly into present and thus menace the future, Hanif Abdurraquib’s poems encompass the quiet and often lonely genius of our creativity as a means to “imagine that anything / can become us.” The beauty of our excellence is soundtracked by love and violence, the “agony threaded together by the same chorus” of what we fight for and how we continue, visibly or secretly garlanded, heralded by our own painfully ecstatic voices “making [our] own ending.” The fortune is us and it is ours. With a music as richly profound as we are, Abdurraquib makes it undeniably so. —Khadijah Queen