A Fortune for Your Disaster

Starred review from August 19, 2019
This resonant second collection from cultural critic, essayist, and poet Abdurraqib grapples with physical and emotional acts of violence and their political context. Woven throughout these lyrical meditations on racial tension, heartbreak, friendship, and pop culture, 13 poems titled “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This” display Abdurraqib’s technical dexterity, particularly with enjambment (“Forgive me, for I have been nurturing/ my well-worn grudges against beauty”), while creating a sense of conditions both inescapable and irresolvable. Abdurraqib’s background in music criticism informs an imaginative series engaged with Marvin Gaye, which in its more effective turns (“your mama so black she my mama too”) combines pathos with affectionate humor. Several poems titled “It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die” explore the human cost of playing God, while elsewhere, poems provide visceral eyewitness sense of everyday life with precise insights: “The mailman still hands me bills like I should be lucky to have my name on anything in this town.” More confessional poems, such as “And Just Like That, I Part Ways with the Only Thing I Won in the Divorce,” create a narrative continuity with the poet’s previous collection; these speakers’ losses may suggest that “true wealth/ is the ability to embrace forgetting,” yet such wry commentary reveals its own hard-won, defiant resilience.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
An old adage in creative writing workshops holds that a writer ought to show how an action or idea unfolds instead of simply telling readers that it happened. So when an author's unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it's tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry, the author's second collection (after The Crown Ain't Worth Much, 2016). With the swagger of a boxer and the restraint of a scholar, Abdurraqib invokes pop culture and Black history with equal ease, alternating stream-of-consciousness prose poems with deeply introspective lamentations. Abdurraqib includes several series of poems that share the same title, and these serve as refrains for the book. Poems titled How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This describe the roses at Obama's feet in Kehinde Wiley's presidential portrait or a young woman named Jasmine popping gum at a funeral. Indeed, a fatal specter haunts the book, which is perhaps what gives every verse such urgency. Undoubtedly, this is the latest entry in what promises to be a long and fruitful career.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)