2019 Favorites: September — A Fortune For Your Disaster
Hanif Abdurraqib’s second poetry collection shows a writer having fun with the medium while still bringing nuance and care.
In a venture that is equal parts keeping track of some of the favorite things that happen in 2019 and also stretching my writing muscles to think about things other than sports (and more specifically), I’m going to post about my favorite things I come by each month. That includes anything from a movie to a tweet to a great meal. Here’s to enjoying, and remembering, the best parts of the year.
January: Maggie Rogers’ Heard It In A Past Life
February: Desus & Mero Return On Showtime
March: Sabrina Carpenter Concert @ House of Blues
April: Game of Thrones “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”
May: Florence + the Machine Concert @ T-Mobile Arena
June: Booksmart
July: Ashlyn Harris’ World Cup Instagram story
August: The Farewell
Favorite of the Month: A Fortune For Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraquib
To read Hanif Abdurraqib’s second collection of poems is to read from someone who seems to have a sense of self as well as where that self fits onto a page. That’s not to say that he writes from a perspective looking down on those who have not reached a level of self-actualization, but rather, the acceptance of process releases him from hesitation and unlocks his mind for the reader. A Fortune For Your Disaster reads like someone writing not from a place of total peace, but someone who is at peace with the fact that sometimes, inner-calm requires more work on some days than it does on others.
As much as I want to write about this book from a critical point of view that analyzes the work as a whole and dissect it within its individual poems. I don’t feel all that comfortable writing from that point of view. I’m still relatively new in the poetry world. While I occasionally write and publish pieces of my own, I feel elementary in my understanding of its technical aspects.
I know enough to know what I love about Abdurraqib’s writing. Whether he’s writing about Mohamed Salah or Carly Rae Jepsen or Julien Baker, his criticism is borne of love for either the subject’s work or for the medium itself.
Abdurraqib is my favorite writer working today. It’s the deftness which he floats between sportswriting to personal essay to criticism to poetry that I admire greatly, and the mixture of those elements is what makes his previous book, Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, more than just a look at one of the most influential hip-hop groups ever. There’s a rhythmic lyricism in his writing that is dense but lean, as if the extra work his sentences ask of the reader become part of the comprehension. Through correction, he works toward some sort of finality to close each essay, each poem, and there’s reward in reading the poems out loud and appreciating the sonic quality from which Abdurraqib edits his own work.
In the podcast, The Poet Salon, Abdurraqib rejects the idea of the voice as the instrument, instead saying the language is the instrument whereas the voice takes the places as the amplifier. He also described the role of the poet in the same vain.
“I think a poet has the responsibility of being a band leader of the many sounds that are on the page,” he said.
His first poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, circumvents the themes of death, growing up as a black person in America and the sadness that pulses through. That book was published three years ago, and the evolution that takes the page in Fortune is bridged by his other work between the two.
On another podcast, Abdurraqib went into his desire to write about sadness as more than just sadness. That the avenues to, from, and within sadness can manifest itself in a multitude of ways, and the playfulness resonates throughout the book.
“I’m not writing to define a future so much as I’m writing my way to a place where I can comfortably live to see a future,” he told the Re/VERB podcast.
That pursuit comes through joyfully in Fortune. Multiple threads work their way through the book. He inserts a series of poems titled How Can Black People Write About Flowers At A Time Like This and writes several others toward the ideas of Marvin Gaye and Nikola Tesla. He also titles one poem It Is Maybe Time To Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off and ties it into his mother’s death that happened one year before MJ’s iconic dagger in the NBA Finals against the Jazz. I think it’s this ability to fold in emotions and sports and music and history in a way that feels far from pretentious but instead just like a person whose curiosities are vast. I’d like to think my curiosities are also vast.
Abdurraqib often describes the feeling of being “siblings” of a particular type of grief when it comes to losing his mother. In that sense, he and I are brothers. He talks of working through that grief and hoping to bring these siblings along with him, and maybe that’s part of the connection I have to his work. What I mean is there is a special feeling when someone’s writing feels like they plucked threads of words from your chest that you didn’t know existed and arranges them on the page that becomes a mirror or a window, depending on where this metaphor might go. What I’m saying is: Shoutout to Hanif Abdurraqib. And also, thank you.
Honorable Mentions:
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
I miss Anthony Bourdain a lot. I’m not the first or last person to feel that way, nor am I the first or last to miss Bourdain’s ability to do right by whatever he dedicated his time to describing. No Reservations and Parts Unknown got to the ground of different cities, different countries. He in many ways is what the best kinds of journalism and learning should look like. His work in Kitchen Confidential delving into the underbelly of the culinary scene broke ground. Before things like Chef’s Table and Top Chef gave an aesthetic appeal to the chef’s life, Bourdain painted a gritty, messy and rebellious picture. Like Bourdain’s narrations in his TV shows that would later come, his writing is punchy, sarcastic, a little sadistic and often self-deprecating. It took me far too long to finally take the time to read it, and it’s one I’ll return to often.
Good Time
The Safdie Brothers color New York in the grimiest, most visceral way, and their vehicle for that viewpoint is done with intense grit by Robert Pattinson. I wouldn’t say the movie is enjoyable to watch, but it is undeniably successful in what it does. To watch this movie is to get onto a creaky wooden rollercoaster and let the Safdie Brothers yank you around their film. At the end, all you can really do is catch your breath.
Killing Eve (Season 1)
I’m normally not one for murder-mysteries, but I had a long flight and figured there’s worse ways to kill time than to watch something from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who is creator and executive producer of the show as well as a writer on several episodes. Maybe I was psyching myself out, but I felt like I could tell the difference between the episodes Waller-Bridge wrote and the ones she did not just from the dialogue. There’s a certain type of cadence and rhythm that comes in her jokes, her more dramatic scenes and the blurring in between. Also, Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer are awesome.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This book is devastating and also… beautiful?? The life McCarthy squeezes out of a post-apocalyptic world is at times stunning and ultimately feels like boiled-down curiosity. When the world only poses threats, and when all you can rely on is you and a loved one, how do you know if you’re the “good guy,” or do they even exist? That’s the question I found fascinating on the first read. It’s a book I’ll think about for a long while.
Ad Astra
I’m just happy we got both Nobody-Is-More-Charasmatic-As-Me Brad Pitt and also Captial-A-Actor Brad Pitt in 2019. Ad Astra gives a platform to the latter, and while the movie as a whole is clumsy in getting across a particular message and relies a little heavily on a voiceover, watching Brad Pitt at the center of a movie as internal as this one was bound to be some sort of enjoyable.
