The literary stamina of Hanif Abdurraqib is impressive. He is the author of two poetry collections and three nonfiction books, plus countless articles, reviews and essays as a music journalist and culture critic for the New York Times, among others.
He is also much lauded. Earlier this month he was announced as one of the recipients of a Windham-Campbell prize, and in 2021 was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” as well as the Gordon Burn prize for A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance – a book in which all his talents came together. Structurally inventive, it is a well-balanced mix of memoir and ruminations on Black American music, culture and history. Some of the essays are built on loose poetic forms and the result is audacious, energetic and playful (and sometimes painful), conjuring the feeling of a writer running for his life, running out of time, running circles around his traumas and joys.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is about “the emotional politics of place” and what it means to honour (and sometimes be honoured by) our home towns when we leave, and the demons we may have to reckon with when we return.
His gaze is turned upwards towards the gods and kings who are basketball players at the top of their game – men such as LeBron James and Michael Jordan, who are ordained on the court, their image pasted on the walls of bedrooms and prison cells, their performances defying the laws of what is and isn’t possible for mere mortals.
As they were born and raised in Ohio a year apart, Abdurraqib blends his own biography with that of James, contrasting the star’s rise with his own less obvious ascent. Abdurraqib was at one point “unhoused” and jailed for petty theft, while the teenage James drove to school in expensive cars even before he made it to the NBA. For him, basketball was “his way out the hood”, while Abdurraqib’s writing talent and emotional intelligence allow him to reframe his circumstances and shortcomings, to honour and grieve them in equal measure.
There’s Always This Year stands in opposition to disappearing into depression by revising the rules for Black men, whether they are exceptional or not. Abdurraqib’s approach is at times whimsical and meandering, at others sober and reflective, but almost always self-aware. The American dream promises material rewards for those who strive and hustle hard but, conveniently, doesn’t factor in poverty, race, gender, sexuality, education, disability and neurodiversity, and how they may affect your rise or fall.
I read this book while in ascension myself, on a plane to New Orleans, where I first attended an NBA basketball game. There I sat facing the shiny maple wood floor of the Smoothie King Center, home of the New Orleans Pelicans, struck by the athleticism of a sport I knew little of but had read many poems about – by Terrance Hayes and Inua Ellams, Jim Carroll and Natalie Diaz. Now Abdurraqib, too, captures the experience in the heightened mode of the poet. So much so that by the time my plane descended, I felt invigorated, as if I had been called to reckon with my own gentrified home town and the nostalgia and survivor’s guilt I feel for having left it, despite sometimes longing to return.
There’s Always This Year also contains the stories of basketball’s forgotten players, such as Kenny Gregory and Estaban Weaver, the one-time rising stars who fell by the wayside. I felt their tales as powerfully as those of the anointed kings, because Abdurraqib has found an entertaining way to make the act of watching sport akin to witnessing miracles. If you are looking to read something that “pushes against the door of reality and offers an elsewhere”, I recommend this title.
Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus (Pan Macmillan, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, pre-order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
