RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe sensation...is of a strong current muscling its way through a landscape ... A Fortune for Your Disaster, bears many of the hallmarks of [Abdurraquib\'s first collection]: a tight focus on the people in his immediate vicinity, a tendency to let the lines spool out in search of epiphany or closure, a nascent tendency toward more explicit form; but in this new one, we see a poet more strongly in control of his gifts, and scrutinizing some of the skills and proclivities that got him to where he is. Though Abdurraqib is a romantic...this collection is ultimately skeptical, wondering what kind of trouble — as well as what kind of ecstasy — romance and intimacy, writ large, can get one into ... Overall, Abdurraqib shows a stupendous amount of control with his line breaks. He also experiments much more with stanzaic and visual variety, which counters the headlong emotional pitch of the poems, giving the reader sharply delineated spaces to pause and contemplate the mechanics of the trick we’re witnessing ... There’s no doubt that Abdurraqib has a lot to be serious about, but it’s also refreshing to see the majestic illusionist draw the audience in with a little bit of close-up magic. He reminds us, with self-deprecating irony, that trust is important to both poetry and magic, and that if this trust is broken, it should be to dazzle, not to harm.
