A heartbreaking work of poetry by Hanif Abdurraqib. His poems pack a powerful sentiment that can be felt long after reading this work. While the target audience is much older than the students I teach, this book is a must read for adults of any age.

I'm a new but big fan of Hanif Abdurraqib's work, both as a poet and essayist. This collection is refreshing, deeply feeling, and unflinching, and I found myself rereading sections and searching for audio of him performing them because they were so beautiful and precise. These poems are graceful and gritty in equal measure, often somehow at the same time. I appreciated the number of poems that shared titles, watching Abdurraqib return to central themes and images and questions and people, like a true artist wrestling with the different things they mean and the different answers they might be given. In that way, the collection feels truly like a collection, they can of course be read and appreciated apart, but they tell such a story and journey when considered together. I'm sure I'll be rereading these for awhile and continuing to revel in new moments and turns of phrase I missed the first few times I read them.

Visceral poetry focused on grief and anger. You can feel the loss in his poetry. There is a need to feel something, anything, that comes after grief. Even if it means to stare down an enemy or hoping two people get into a fight in a dog park. The need to feel something real is palpable. It's a book on grief and desperation. It is a need for human contact after a loss.

OTES FROM
A Fortune for Your Disaster
Hanif Abdurraqib

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 10

Imagine, instead: the place where you have a bed of your own & a table to sit across from someone who laughs thick & echoing at your smallest joy as an open palm & then the fingers close

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 15

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.

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 19

my pal died not when pill bottle rolled empty from his unfurling palm. It was sometime after that, when I told his old girlfriend

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 26

& I imagine this is no longer over cheese but over every mode of unfulfilled promise.

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 3

when my heartbreak was a different animal howling at the same clouds

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 3

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

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 3

not everything is Sisyphean. no one ever wants to imagine themselves as the boulder.

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 5

when the stakes are most violent I suppose we all become what we resemble most &

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 5

I feel guilty when I start to hope that the dog owners throw a punch at each other just so I can remember what it looks like when a fist determines its own destiny &

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 6

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.

September 10, 2019The Pledge, p. 10

I wish this type of betrayal on no one: being born out of that which will be your undoing.

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 11

I am talking about the end of love—how the door closes one night & never re-opens. The coffee mug left with a lover’s unshakable stains in the bottom & the single fork from the infant night in the first shared apartment & all of the relics we have to craft the leash used to keep our misery close

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 13

the difference between a warning & a threat is all a matter of what you’ve lived through

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 18

Everyone who thinks of death as peaceful place is still alive

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 25

I am sorry that there is no way to describe this that is not about agony or that is not about someone being torn from the perch of their comfort & on the same night a year before my mother died Jordan wept on the floor of the United Center locker room after winning another title because it was father’s day & his father went to sleep on the side of a road in ’93 & woke up a ghost & there is no moment worth falling to our knees & galloping towards like the one that sings our dead into the architecture & so yes for a moment in 1998 Michael Jordan made what space he could on the path between him & his father’s small & breathing grace

September 11, 2019The Pledge, p. 27

Only thing that separates purgatory and hell is whether or not you can see the face of someone you’ve loved in the fire,

September 11, 2019The Turn, p. 44

and it is really something to love only the unseen and still be finite

September 11, 2019The Turn, p. 54

is it that memory is a field with endless graves

September 11, 2019The Turn, p. 57

Here, finally, a country worth living in. One that falls thick from whatever it is we love so much that we can’t stop letting it kill us. If we must die, let it be inside here. If we must.

September 14, 2019The Turn, p. 60

it is impossible to know what you’d kill for until you hold a face in your two hands underneath a streetlight on a block where killing pays the rent. where, as a boy,

September 11, 2019The Turn, p. 43

is that i cling to the past because in it, i had yet to know pain

September 11, 2019The Turn, p. 55

It is impossible to tell your saints from your sinners when a fistful of dollar bills descends on a room. It is

September 11, 2019The Turn, p. 55

Loneliness is the drug from which all other drugs obtain their architecture

September 11, 2019The Turn, p. 57

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

September 13, 2019The Turn, p. 59

all of my idols died

September 15, 2019The Prestige, p. 77

I can tell Magic from science by whether or not there is a body in the casket. WHAT

September 15, 2019The Prestige, p. 84

bring to me your palms overflowing with the production of your most intemperate anguish & i promise there is no target i will not stand in front of for you. there is no wood that could fashion a cross to hold me.

September 15, 2019The Prestige, p. 91

love is not the drug itself but is the fluorescent palm which splits the earth in the name of its blooming. not the drug, but the object so beautiful it demands to be stitched into something which the body can consume.

September 15, 2019The Prestige, p. 91

may even the residue of our love find a curve of wind to dance an echo into. THE

September 14, 2019The Prestige, p. 71

I mean those of us who have reached for a song & pulled back a coffin
All Excerpts From


Abdurraqib, Hanif. “A Fortune for Your Disaster.” Tin House Books, 2019-04-24. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Abdurraqib’s poetry spins circles around his reader, creating layers of imagery and language that bring his work to life. A master of language, he plays with form while bringing in modern topics.

Reading A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib was engaging, cathartic, and soul-stirring all at the same time. These poems will haunt you, leave you deep in thought long after you’ve finished reading. They will sit with you like a recently-found, long-lost friend who has no intentions of leaving anytime soon. And I think it’s necessary. So often we want to push tragedy and sadness out of our hearts and minds, using any catalyst for comfort we can conjure up. These poems trigger us, make us remember, make us mourn, then challenge us to carry on.

Thank you to Tin House Books and Netgalley for an ARC of this beautifully heart-breaking collection of poetry in exchange for an honest review. I will share more about this book closer to the release date.

Once again Hanif Abdurraqib delivers a beautiful collection of poetry, His words touch on identity and reflections on life that drip with authenticity and beg to be read. He plays with the past and the present and weaves together the personal and interpersonal. This is a must-read.

Is the best thing about poetry books how you can read them backwards?
No.
(Though that is nice.)
The best thing about poetry books is finding someone who speaks your language, who revels in the same source material, the same melodic progressions as you; who can make you feel—for lines or pages at a time—like your preoccupations and obsessions are other people’s. Like your weird lonely brain places aren’t actually population: 1. Like your ugliest convictions also deserve the light.
🗯
In A FORTUNE FOR YOUR DISASTER, Hanif Abdurraqib writes primarily about heartbreak, but also about people living inside of songs, and what it means to leave a place that has its teeth in you and what it means to return, and what it is when the thing with teeth is a person or a
country,
a memory or
a song.
🗯
The best poetry is like being on really good drugs, the kind that crack open your gates and fill you with a power like the unknowable sensation of running across a water’s surface. Hanif’s poems are that for me: a conduit to emotion and the freedom of gracelessness forgiven.
🗯
What a gift that is, to feel high, and loved, and free, all thanks to typeset on a page. And what a gift given. Thanks to Hanif Abdurraqib and @tin_house for the gift (& @netgalley for approving my ARC request...after I managed to snag this at #ALAac19). I couldn’t pre-order this fast enough.