Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetry is a powerful blend of memory, music, grief, and Black American experience, written in a voice that feels intimate, tender, and urgent. His poems often move like conversations—softly spoken yet emotionally charged—where he reflects on love, loss, neighborhoods, and the cultural forces that shape everyday life. One of the most striking qualities of Abdurraqib’s work is the way he weaves pop culture, especially music and sports, into deeper meditations on identity and survival. A single song, a basketball moment, or a street in his hometown can open into reflections about belonging and the fragile beauty of being alive.
His language is lyrical but grounded, using repetition, rhythm, and vivid imagery to capture complicated emotions with clarity. Abdurraqib writes about grief not as an ending, but as a living companion—something carried, reshaped, and understood over time. At the same time, his poems celebrate joy, community, and resilience, showing how love persists even in difficult histories.
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| Hanif abdurraqib |
Overall, Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetry stands out for its emotional honesty, musical flow, and the way it honors everyday moments as sites of wonder and healing. His work invites readers to listen more closely—to themselves, to others, and to the world’s small, trembling beauties.
My Wife Says That There Are So Many Songs
That aren’t about what we thought they were when we were kids.
There hasn’t been anything romantic written since the 70’s.
All songs are about how much of someone we can take into ourselves
until we both become dust. It is evening once more. By the time
we go to sleep there will be another city to call our own.
Another home to fold us into its cracked hands. I pick branches off
of my mother’s grave again. I don’t know what will stretch itself
over the stone after I have left it to its own growing. Everyone
tells me that the Third Eye Blind song isn’t about what I thought
it was about in 1997 when we covered the head of the cold body.
When the men carried the coffin and buried it here. I walked the
streets of a borrowed city with headphones and stopped speaking.
Only allowed my mouth to shape itself around the words of this
dirge that spilled out of pop radio, out of college house parties.
And tonight, as the state where we fell in love becomes another
ghost between us, playing a mixtape I made, it leaps out the
speakers. I sing along to the line I'm smiling, she's living;
she's golden and then rewind it.
When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind Of Like Being A Chicago Bulls Fan
what I mean is that my father can tell a bunch of cool stories
about back in the day when I was truly great. there is a mountain
of gold that has gathered dust in the corner where I used to
sleep, and look at all of these pictures. in this one, I am
wearing rainbow shorts and hurling rocks at a shoreline. in
this one, I am smiling in the glow of 13 lit candles pushed
into a sheet of dark sugar. you may ask why I allow my face to
drown in less and less joy with each passing year and I will say
I just woke up one day and I was a still photo in everyone else’s
home but my own. or I will say I promise that my legs just need
another season, and then I will be who you fell in love with again.
and then I will probably just say I’m sorry that there was once a
tremendous blue sky and then a decade of hard, incessant rain.
The Prestige
the poem begins not where the knife enters
but where the blade twists.
Some wounds cannot be hushed
no matter the way one writes of blood
& what reflection arrives in its pooling.
The poem begins with pain as a mirror
inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me
before my first funeral & so the poem begins
with old grief again at my neck. On the radio,
a singer born in a place where children watch the sky
for bombs is trying to sell me on love
as something akin to war.
I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.
I was most like the bullet when I viewed the body as a door.
I’m past that now. No one will bury their kin
when desire becomes a fugitive
between us. There will be no folded flag
at the doorstep. A person only gets to be called a widow once,
and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.
Gratitude, not for love itself, but for the way it can end
without a house on fire.
This is how I plan to leave next.
I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure
for the cloak of despair thrown over our bright & precious
corners but tell that to the lone bird who did not get the memo
dizzy & shouting into the newly unfamiliar absence of morning
light from atop a sagging branch outside my window—a branch
which, too, was closer to the sky before falling into the chorus
line of winter’s relentless percussion all of us, victims to this flimsy math
of hours I was told there was a cure for this. I was told the darkness
would surrender its weapons & retreat I know of no devils who evict themselves
to the point of permanence. and still, on the days I want
to be alive the sunlight leaves me stunned like a kiss
from someone who has already twirled away by the time my eyes open
on the days I want to be alive I tell myself I deserve a marching band
or at least a string section to announce my arrival above
ground for another cluster of hours. if not a string section, at least one
drummer & a loud-voiced singer well versed in what might move me
to dance. what might push my hand through a crowded sidewalk
towards a woman who looks like a woman from my dreams
which means nothing if you dream as I do, everyone a hazy quilt
of features only familiar enough to lead me through a cavern of longing
upon my waking & so I declare on the days I want to be alive I might drag
my drummer & my singer to your doorstep & ask you to dance
yes, you, who also survived the groaning machinery of darkness
you who, despite this, do not want to be perceived in an empire
awash with light in the sinning hours & we will dance
until our joyful heaving flows into breathless crying, the two often pouring
out of the chest’s orchestra at the same tempo, siblings in their arrival & listen,
there will be no horns to in the marching band of my survival.
the preacher says there will be horns at the gates of the apocalypse & I believed even myself
the angel of death as a boy, when I held my lips to a metal mouthpiece & blew out a tune
about autumn & I am pressing your ear to my window & asking if you can hear the deep
moans of the anguished bird & how the wind bends them into what sounds like a child
clumsily pushing air into a trumpet for the first time & there’s the joke:
only a fool believes that the sound at the end of the world would be sweet.
Unceremonious as birth in a country overrun
by the ungrateful living. The poem begins with a chain
of well-meaning liars walking one by one
off the earth’s edge. That’s who died
and made me king. Who died and made you.
Glamor on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything
from the humid brick building below my humid brick building, a woman
bellows at the pizza man. who, it seems, threw no cheese atop the crust
& its red river of sauce because—as he shouts above the sirens of State
Street & the growing crowd lined outside his shop—it is Friday night
& he is woefully short on mozzarella & there are far better pizza options
on every corner of this city, overpriced & tonight bursting at the seams
with lonely people who will seek the warmth spilling from the edges
of a cardboard box & onto their laps & into their fingers on the walk
back to a newly empty apartment. I love the heat for how it separates
the desire for touch from the practicality of it. If it gets too hot to fuck,
like it did for mookie & tina, then we’re all on our own sinking islands
anyway. there is no cheese in this town anymore & what could be worse
than the fraction of a dream behind every door you crawl to. it is friday & surely
some of my people are praising the fresh coin in their bank accounts & what
a tragedy to spend it on a half-finished freedom & the argument below has poured
out into the streets & the waiting masses & I imagine this is no longer over
cheese but over every mode of unfulfilled promise. the cluster of sins still stuck to a body
fresh from the waters of baptism. the parent who must dig a grave for their youngest
child. from below, a man yells there are only three ingredients. you can’t even get that right.
isn’t it funny, to vow that you will love someone until you are dead.
