Reviewed by Keith Kopka

A Fortune for Your Disaster, Hanif Abdurraqib's second collection of poetry, challenges its audience to take part in a transformation. Replete with Abdurraqib's trademark pop-culture wit, the collection is able to engage with the tradition of confessional poetry while challenging that tradition through form and subject in order to craft a unique voice that presents readers with the unexpected, even when the core subjects of these poems often are some of the most poetically identifiable (heartbreak, loss, death, etc.). What results from this interplay is a powerful collection that asks readers to reimagine their expectations of what the confessional mode is capable of in contemporary poetry.  

Jeffrey McDaniel, in his article "post-confessional poetry?," defines the "post-confessional" as "poems that enter into a place of psychic fracture, often involving family, and elaborate on or develop techniques used by the confessional poets." This idea of "psychic fracture" is key to understanding the success of the poems in A Fortune for Your Disaster. Through the use of titular repetition, Abdurraqib is able to bring order to the overall narrative structure of the collection, while simultaneously fracturing the narrative arcs in order to create a kind of confessional echo. For example, in the thirteen-poem series "How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This," Abdurraqib writes: 

underneath a streetlight on a block where killing pays
the rent. where as a boy, I would pluck the incense 

from its plastic & place it between the tight ring
of the incense holder's mouth & my father would sing
the call to prayer while the white smoke plumed & divided 

into siblings with each syllable & so i think it is true
that niggas don't want no smoke if by that i am saying niggas
don't want to be a memory or niggas don't want to have their name blown

from their father's lips in a prayer of forgetting. i tell the homie
not to bring guns to my resting place. Someone i love is sleeping here tonight. 

Through the practice of psychic fracture, Abdurraqib is able to use lines like these to explore very personal instances of family, loss, violence, and heartbreak, while also connecting these themes to larger social and political issues, as well as identity politics. This type of psychic fracture is deployed multiple times across the collection, each time with a different objective. For example, in another repetitively titular series, "It's Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die," Abdurraqib employs psychic fracture in order to explore the dangers of the hubris involved in playing God. These types of social critiques are far from new in contemporary poetry. However, Abdurraqib's effortless and often prosaic style, as well as the tension that results from contextualizing these more ambitious fractured narratives with poems more dependent on references to popular culture and the quotidian, allows Abdurraqib's voice to stand out among his peers.  

Formally, the poems in A Fortune for Your Disaster run the proverbial gamut. By bouncing back and forth between prose lines and shorter, more lyric compositions, Abdurraqib is able to mimic the narrative tension that he has crafted throughout the collection in the formal composition of these poems. Even the smaller formal choices throughout these poems work to further this goal. For example, Abdurraqib often chooses to use the ampersand instead of the full conjunctive, and he also does not capitalize his use of first person or the first words of sentences throughout the collection. The result of these choices is that the speed at which Abdurraqib is able to deliver information, especially in prose form, is blinding. If readers aren't careful, they are liable to miss the beauty in the structure of Abdurraqib's images and sentences. However, on an emotional level, this speed also has a rhythmic nature that adds a frantic quality to the subject matter of many of these poems. It allows for Abdurraqib to effortlessly balance disparate subjects, until he sticks the landing with a powerful moment of self-interrogation or a cultural epiphany. In the poem "It Is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent & This Is How We Do It," the speaker moves at breakneck speed between memories of innocence in youth and a more pragmatic, mature voice that has a better understanding of violence and loss:

. . . & there it was, the summer i learned to kiss the air & imagine it bending into a mouth & here it is again, the summer everything outside i love is melting & i tell my boys there is a reason songs from the 90s are having a revival & it's because the heart & tongue are the muscles with the most irresistible histories & i'm kind of buzzed. i'm kind of buzzing. i'm kind of a hive with no begging & hollow cavities. 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 . . . 

Abdurraqib's craft is impeccable across the entirety of this collection. In fact, there are times when the sentences roll by so quickly that the poems have an immersive effect, the emotional result of which is only clear when a section breaks in order to allow the reader to come up for air.

A Fortune for Your Disaster is a book that has the ambition of transcendence, and, for the most part, it is successful in achieving that goal. Abdurraqib is a poetic magician who sets up each section of his book as one of the steps in the completion of a magic trick, a very cheeky, Abdurraqib-like nod to Christopher Nolan's 2006 film The Prestige. In Nolan's film, the execution of a successful trick is broken down into three categories: "the pledge," "the turn," and "the prestige," respectively. The first stage is when the magician shows you an ordinary object, the second is when something is done to that object to make it extraordinary, and the third is when that object has been transformed. Throughout this collection Abdurraqib uses all of the literary magic at his disposal to achieve transformation. Through impeccable craft, as well as by reimagining formal and thematic conventions, he achieves not only a transformation, but also, like all good magicians, a strong desire from the audience to see Abdurraqib perform the feat again in hopes that they may once more be mesmerized by the craft of a talented artist.