December 15, 2023
The acclaimed poet and cultural critic uses his lifelong relationship with basketball to muse on the ways in which we grow attached to our hometowns, even when they fail us. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America and Go Ahead in the Rain, was in awe of the talents of such local basketball players as the legendary LeBron James ("a 14-year-old, skinny and seemingly poured into an oversized basketball uniform that always suggested it was one quick move away from evicting him") and Kenny Gregory, who went on to play college basketball for the Kansas Jayhawks. Abdurraqib's complex love of the sport and its players mirrors the complexity of his love for his home state, where he's spent time unhoused as well as incarcerated, and where his mother passed away when he was only a child. "It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave," he writes. Yet, despite witnessing the deaths of friends and watching the media deem his home a "war zone," the author feels unable to leave. "Understand this: some of our dreams were never your dreams, and will never be," he writes. "When we were young, so many people I loved just wanted to live forever, where we were. And so yes, if you are scared, stay scared. Stay far enough away from where our kinfolk rest so that a city won't get any ideas." Structured as four quarters, delineated by time markers echoing a countdown clock, the narrative includes timeouts and intermissions that incorporate poetry. Lyrically stunning and profoundly moving, the confessional text wanders through a variety of topics without ever losing its vulnerability, insight, or focus. Abdurraqib's use of second person is sometimes cloying, but overall, this is a formally inventive, gorgeously personal triumph. An innovative memoir encompassing sports, mortality, belonging, and home.

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Starred review from January 1, 2024
MacArthur fellow Abdurraqib follows his Carnegie Medal-winning A Little Devil in America (2022) with another unique, memoir-propelled, far-ranging, and affecting inquiry. Basketball is the heart of this many-faceted exploration, from gatherings at the garage hoop at his family home to competition at the neighborhood's most popular court to high-school champions to LeBron James. Structured like a game in quarters and minutes, it's a galvanic drive through the intricacies of family, community, belief, and dreams. Ascension, for Abdurraqib, is soaring to the basket and elevating as a human being. As players, teams, and fans ascend, so does a neighborhood, even one called a war zone by outsiders, and a city, in particular the one Abdurraqib's loves, his hometown, Columbus, Ohio. Passionately attuned to the resonance of home and heartbreak, survival and mercy, he also chronicles descension, sharing unforgettable tales about becoming unhoused and incarcerated. He writes about growing up Muslim, losing his mother at a young age, friends and enemies, athletes as gods, police murders of unarmed Black boys and men, "the gospel of suffering," paying witness, protesting, music, miracles, love, and time's mutability. Abdurraqib keeps multiple balls in the air as he swerves, spins, and scores, and every thoughtfully considered and vividly described element and emotion, action and moment, ultimately, connects. An exhilarating, heartfelt, virtuoso, and profound performance.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Poet and writer Abdurraqib is a reader favorite with his fresh, innovative work and magnetic social media presence, and the focus of his latest will create new fans.

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March 1, 2024

In There's Always This Year, Macarthur fellow Abdurraqib takes a break from poetry and criticism to reflect on growing up in Ohio when basketball had a special LeBron James and what it means to be successful. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from March 11, 2024
Cultural critic Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America) returns with a triumphant meditation on basketball and belonging. Serving as a love letter to Abdurraqib’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and the state more broadly, the book is structured like a basketball game, divided into four “quarters” with game clock time stamps demarcating section breaks. The first quarter describes the collective ecstasy Columbus felt during a 2002 game in which the city’s nationally ranked high school basketball team held its own against an Akron team featuring up-and-comer LeBron James. Abdurraqib suggests the Columbus team’s respectable showing (they lost in overtime) asserted the greater community’s pride in spite of politicians and police who called Black Columbus neighborhoods “war zones.” Elsewhere, the author considers the “era of Ohio Heartbreak” that followed James’s decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat in 2010, and offers a lyrical account of the protests that followed Columbus police’s 2016 killing of 23-year-old Black man Henry Green. (He writes of the makeshift shrine on the sidewalk where Green was shot: “Whatever is left behind dries and turns a dark crimson, the wayward light from candles flickering over what remains—a strange kind of memorial, a strange kind of haunting.”) The narrative works as if by alchemy, forging personal anecdotes, sports history, and cultural analysis into a bracing contemplation of the relationship between sport teams and their communities. This is another slam dunk from Abdurraqib. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, Gernert Co.