A Fortune for Your Disaster – Hanif Abdurraqib

I don’t “get” poetry in the traditional sense, but Hanif Abdurraqib makes me want to try. “A Fortune for Your Disaster” is a collection about grief, heartbreak, cultural memory and survival, filtered through a voice that’s as obsessed with symbolism as it is with specificity. 

Even when I didn’t fully understand it, I still felt it.

The book is divided into three parts — The Pledge, The Turn and The Prestige — mirroring the structure of a magic trick. It’s a fitting metaphor for a collection that deals in misdirection, return and revelation. 

The standouts for me: “I’d Ask You To Reconsider the Idea That Things Are As Bad As They’ve Always Been” is urgent and layered without being heavy-handed. “Watching a Fight at the New Haven Dog Park, First Two Dogs and Then Their Owners” delivers both a scene and a metaphor in one sharp punch, and “The Prestige,” as a closing poem, lands with exactly the right mix of melancholy and clarity.

Abdurraqib returns often to familiar motifs: Michael Jordan, Marvin Gaye, punk music, Ohio. These fixations give his work texture, but by this third book, I’m starting to feel the repetition. That said, even when his references start to blur, the emotion holds. He's a poet who writes like a music critic and a biographer, and his work is intimate but always scanning the wider world.

One of the more interesting — and at times frustrating — choices Abdurraqib makes is titling multiple poems the same: “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This.” These variations are scattered throughout the book, and I found myself wishing I could read them as one continuous piece, but maybe that fragmentation is part of the point. 

If you're newer to poetry, this is a great entry point. There's enough cultural reference and narrative grounding to make you feel like you’re “getting it,” even if some symbolism is out of reach. If you’ve read his essay collections, this doesn’t reinvent his voice, but it doesn’t need to. If he writes from a place of obsession, at least it’s an obsession that still manages to find something new in every mirror it holds up.

Rating (story): 4/5 stars

Rating (narration): N/A

Format: Paperback (personal library)

Dates read: April 14, 2025

Multi-tasking: N/A