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Hanif Abdurraqib
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A Fortune for Your Disaster Paperback – September 3, 2019

by Hanif Abdurraqib (Author)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 156 ratings
Goodreads Choice Award nominee
See all formats and editions
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“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.” ―Booklist, Starred Review

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.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    108 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Tin House Books
  4. Publication date
    September 3, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    7.5 x 0.4 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1947793438
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1947793439
  8. See all details
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From the Publisher

Hanif Abdurraqib A Fortune for Your Disaster

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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)

"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

About the Author

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist. and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a best book of 2017 by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and Pitchfork, among others. His most recent book, a New York Times bestseller, is Go Ahead in the Rain, a biography of A Tribe Called Quest.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tin House Books (September 3, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 108 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1947793438
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1947793439
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.4 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 156 ratings

About the author

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Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib

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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, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5
156 global ratings
Beautiful poetry collection
5 Stars
Beautiful poetry collection
I bought the paperback book in 2021. I had already read one of his previous poetry collections. The format of this book is very well thought. I love the imagery and figurative language Abdurraqib expresses. I'm still going through it and annotating it and pulling some of my favorite lines from it. It requires a lot of thinking but you can also enjoy it for the lyrical and interesting story-telling pieces. Highly recommend for any fan of niche poems.
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Top reviews from the United States

Crystal Stone
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, Heartbreaking
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2020
Verified Purchase
So much love and loneliness in this collection. In one poem, "the women all threw roses at my feet in California until the roses looked like chains." Beauty is not separate from pain - they happen simultaneously in his poems. And even in the haunting, there are light-hearted moments that could make you laugh or nod. He writes, "I tend to think forgiveness looks the way it does in the movies / like two white people kissing in the rain & it is always white people kissing in the rain on television & it is a question of hair, I imagine." Marvin Gaye's ghost appears throughout observing. The poems will position you, too, as witness, questioner, ghost. You'll find yourself re-thinking loss, purpose. A must-read.
3 people found this helpful
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Beth Martin
5.0 out of 5 stars Must-read
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2021
Verified Purchase
This book is lovely. Beautiful, emotional, a must-read for anyone who loves poetry.
One person found this helpful
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Michael Bishop
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible work
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2019
Verified Purchase
Hanif has long been one of my favorite poets, and this is a brilliant follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much.
One person found this helpful
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TwinMom
4.0 out of 5 stars The Yin and Yang of Love and Loss
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2019
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
Hanif’s newest collection doesn’t disappoint. A haunting and somewhat bleak recounting of tragedy, violence, racism, hate, love, sadness and self-reflection, this compilation is Hanif’s roadmap to resilience and rebuilding after heartbreak.

There is alot to unpack in this book, death of a parent, divorce, violence, all intertwined with humor, sadness, cultural call outs and Marvin Gaye. Only Hanif can make me wryly laugh by calling out Michael Jordan, Marvin Gaye and Nikola Tesla all while feeling the heavy weight of his words.

I recommend savoring this book in small bites. I read it in one sitting, like a glutton at a buffet. I came away feeling overly full and missed some of the meaning toward the end. This is a book to enjoy one poem at a time.
3 people found this helpful
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Roni G
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book of poems.
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2020
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Thought provoking, beautiful writing.
One person found this helpful
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Alic L
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful poetry collection
Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2024
I bought the paperback book in 2021. I had already read one of his previous poetry collections. The format of this book is very well thought. I love the imagery and figurative language Abdurraqib expresses. I'm still going through it and annotating it and pulling some of my favorite lines from it. It requires a lot of thinking but you can also enjoy it for the lyrical and interesting story-telling pieces. Highly recommend for any fan of niche poems.
Customer image
Alic L
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful poetry collection
Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2024
I bought the paperback book in 2021. I had already read one of his previous poetry collections. The format of this book is very well thought. I love the imagery and figurative language Abdurraqib expresses. I'm still going through it and annotating it and pulling some of my favorite lines from it. It requires a lot of thinking but you can also enjoy it for the lyrical and interesting story-telling pieces. Highly recommend for any fan of niche poems.
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Case Quarter
5.0 out of 5 stars How to Be a Black Romantic in a Time of Afrofuturism or There is Life after Divorce
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2019
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
hanif abdurraqib is an incurable romantic at heart. the first of three sections of this collection take him through love and innocence. the second section descends into darkness, self-pity, lonliness and despair, the death of mother, a divorce, the black ghetto with paradoxical cultural tropes of words and things which simultaneously hurt and heal, weaken and strengthen—the companions, church, in one poem there’s mention of a therapist, which, in the third section, become an arrangement of fragments surrounding a new vision of the self, a willingness and experience to speak of his past with acceptance.

many of these pieces are prose poems. some, the same titles are repeatedly used for different poems, recalling terence hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin where every poem bore the same title.

‘the ghost of Marvin Gaye’ appears in the title of eight poems. a lover and critic of contemporary musical forms, several of abdurraqib’s poems feature singers and bands, marvin gaye from the grave is narrator for the poems under his name.

another set of poems with the recurring same title, ‘It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All Of Those People Were Going To Die,’is a bewildering and odd statement about the inventor. one almost wonders if abdurraqib has confused tesla with oppenheimer. his revisits to nikola tesla can be an answer as an afterthought to the comment in the bar in the poem And Just Like That, I Part Ways With The Only Thing I Won In The Divorce:

‘Amy says Afrofuturism is simply the idea that black people will exist in the future … & I said I am not so sure & like any self-fashioned god I cherry pick the aesthetics of my own resurrection.’

afrofuturism for him as a black person is a fixation with tesla’s death ray, which made the inventor a darling of science fiction fans. there is also a poem in which tesla meets gaye.

the third recurring title is a question by a white woman overheard by abdurraqib, while they were part of an audience at a poetry reading by ross gay, a black poet who does write about flowers:

‘How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This?

couched within the title of his book, in the heart of disaster, sci-fi or otherwise, is a flower. and while there are poppies aplenty for all the disasters of the world, not everyone sees poppies in the same way.

these poems slide dangerously close to the slippery slope of the therapeutic. but there are signs in a few of them that the fortunes of this lovelorn poet may fare better in the future involving the affairs of the heart.
3 people found this helpful
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H A Truett
5.0 out of 5 stars Musical and Fresh
Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2020
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
Hanif's language is always fresh and engaging. I have liked his writing since first reading a piece from a different book in one of my poetry classes. I flew through this volume in no time and will come back to it to savor more of the ideas and his poetic choices later. I highly recommend this one. Especially if you also like music. As always, Hanif pulls his love of music into his poetry.
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