Diode Editions
August 1, 2025
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.