From Powells.com
Staff recommendations, guest essays, and curated reading lists.
Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.
Staff Pick
Hanif Abdurraqib’s unflinching and unabashed new poetry collection is a deeply personal work of grief, sorrow, loss, self-reflection, remembrance, violence, love, and death. Gritty and graceful, piercing and profound, A Fortune for Your Disaster connects the forgotten and the unforgettable — stirring your heart almost as easily as it breaks it. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"A riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable — and just right." Kirkus
Review
"...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.'" Khadijah Queen
Review
"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)
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.