Towards a Retreat
Samaa Abdurraqib’s Towards a Retreat is a breathtaking book that refuses easy categorization and instead builds its own emotional and poetic terrain. With each poem, Abdurraqib invites the reader into a space of clarity, reckoning, and deep listening. This is a collection that honors complexity. It is both a meditation and a call to attention.
What makes this collection extraordinary is its ability to hold multiple truths at once. Abdurraqib writes about grief without sentimentality, love without simplification, and Blackness with nuance and care. Her language is precise yet expansive, rooted in the sensory world but always reaching toward something larger. She writes from the woods of Maine, from the remembered streets of the Midwest, from cabins that do not belong to her, and from the interior spaces of the self where identity, memory, and resistance take shape.
The poems unfold like conversations with the land, ancestors, former selves, and the reader. They carry the weight of generational history and personal loss, yet they never collapse under that weight. Instead, they rise. Abdurraqib is a poet who can observe, listen, and shape insight into lines that land with quiet force.
Towards a Retreat is a book that you do not simply read. You move through it. You return to it. It becomes a companion, a mirror, a reminder. It is for those who are seeking truth that is not polished but lived, for anyone who has tried to make sense of the spaces they occupy and the histories they carry.
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Praise
Echoing throughout Samaa Abdurraqib’s Towards a Retreat is the nuanced wisdom of the title, offering what appears to be two contrasting principles, that of forward momentum and that of withdrawal, which, we learn, must work in tandem for the speaker to engage the vast wilderness of her interiority: “I’d piece together a story / of ellipses, dashes, and bent arrows. / I have never known how to be of a place.” And yet, the speaker succeeds in sharing a full picture of the experiences that shaped her—what astonishes and enrages, what she cannot forgive—by way of nature, pointing to the fullness of the pines or the drumbeat of the woodpecker’s heart. Because to be heard is, first, to listen. Because every gesture forward is the self hurtling towards liberation, towards the wild intimacy of the present moment, where, across these poems, we witness the speaker’s voice resound, sweetly and profusely, into the stillness—“I can make of myself what I make of myself”—from her own patient-hearted hands.
– Susan L. Leary, author of Dressing the Bear
Towards a Retreat is like a prayer, reverent with love for the natural world. In fields beneath stars, in woods beside streams, surrounded by a swarm of fireflies, and in the poetry of Black vernacular, Abdurraqib rejects the pastoral Midwest and bucolic New England as white-only spaces and through personal and communal histories reclaims and exalts its Blackness. At once tender and fierce, Towards a Retreat is a confession, a love letter, and an affirmation of all the beauty that home, even with all its hurt, can hold."
– SK Rancy, author of Self-Portrait In Hospital As Camus
Samaa Abdurraqib's Towards a Retreat has the utter talent for fullness and the space for anything without holding back. She refuses to hold back from what nature teaches us, from what music teaches us, from what spaces that don't belong to us teaches us, from grief, and from white nonsense erasing Blackness. There's more I can tell you about the large impact this small chapbook left on me, but you're going to have to experience that for yourself. Sit a while for the retreat you need in Abdurraqib's poetry. You haven't seen rain, rage, or anything stunning like this before.
– Maya Williams, What’s So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway