AL10 — Hanif Abdurraqib’s "There’s Always This Year"
COLUMBUS | The celebrated poet and essayist on basketball, time, and the city
WORDS BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK
When poet Ross Gay joined Cannopy in 2022 for a conversation on his book of essays titled Inciting Joy, he underscored the necessity of writing about beautiful things via a passing comment made by an attendee of one of his poetry readings. This comment was overheard by his friend and fellow poet, Hanif Abdurraqib, who then cited the occasion in the liner notes of one of his own poems:
“I was at a reading shortly after the election, and the poet (who was black) was reading gorgeous poems, which had some consistent and exciting flower imagery. A woman (who was white) behind me—who thought she was whispering to her neighbor—said ‘How can black people write about flowers at a time like this?’ I thought it was so absurd in a way that didn’t make me angry but made me curious. What is the black poet to be writing about ‘at a time like this’ if not to dissect the attractiveness of a flower—that which can arrive beautiful and then slowly die right before our eyes?”
With his latest release, There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib seemingly returns to the question of what exactly it is a Black poet ought to write about at this, or any, time. The result is an expansive book that feels like poetry, looks like an unrelenting tome of essays, and reads like an elegiac autobiography. Basketball, not flowers, is the subject of his dissection, which doubles as an exploration of his time in his native city of Columbus, Ohio. But that’s only the face of it. In its depths, There’s Always This Year is a playing field where basketball is used to talk about everything else: what it means to be here, to ascend, to stay and return, the allures of leaving, aging, the architecture of people that make up a city, and much more.
The formatting of Abdurraqib’s highly subjective but subtly aphoristic recollections and insights is noteworthy for its unconventional, though internally coherent, logic. Mimicking the partition of time in a basketball game, the book is divided into four quarters and a “Pregame” (in the guise of a preface). Each of these quarters features a verbose intermission all sharing the title “A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators”. And like the often surreal passage of time in a basketball game, the chapters within these quarters are substituted for time stamps ranging from 00:00 to 12:00, with some as short as a few sentences and as long as several pages.
The feat Abdurraqib achieves in these 352 pages is managing to not rest the book’s foundations of meaning on any one of its deeply effusive paragraphs. Its entire length can slip through your mind without you grasping hold of any particular “argument” being made, or ground being irrevocably claimed. Yet passages such as this, which make an about-face to the reader to reveal a shared but unheralded truth, are abundant to a wondrous degree:
“I have lied to myself to keep loving a city, to keep myself fixed in the place I am because I’m afraid I know the truth about America, that nowhere is forgiving, and so the unforgiving familiar is better than anywhere else. I’ve heard all of the lies, too. Have smiled and nodded and shrugged them away. Yeah, we fight here. We’ll light some shit on fire and march in these streets, but it’s always in the name of some other niggas, not anyone here who the cops done rolled up on and left bleeding in the street.” ─ 6:05, “Fourth Quarter: City as Its False Self” (pg 270).
It’s also a book about basketball as an aesthetic, as a saving grace, a meeting place. It serenades the meteoric rise of LeBron James as much as it does the ball-park hoopers who didn’t quite ascend to the league:
“On my fifth day, still awaiting my court date, the face of LeBron James was on the television, pushing through the static enough to become unmistakable. It was a preseason interview, it seemed. No one knew what he was saying, and even if we did, it wouldn’t matter. The minute he appeared on the screen, the loud and reckless debate unfurled. He ain’t shit, or he is. Cavs ain’t never gonna be shit, or they are.” ─ 4:00, “Second Quater: Flawed and Mortal Gods” (pg 150).
As if anticipating potential frustration caused by the intractable scope of a book that jumps easily between LeBron’s early years and the latter years of astronaut John Glenn, Abdurraqib begins the work with a direct address to the reader regarding a common enemy. The distinguishing features of this faceless enemy begin to hint at this book’s impressive mission—on its whole, it urges us to form, with urgency, a real and tactile community that could survive whatever lies in the years to come:
“I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloveds. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.” ─ 4:25, “Pregame” (pg 5).
There’s Always This Year was published by Penguin Books Limited, March 26, 2024.
Find this and more in our latest print edition — Issue No. 13:
Interview: Michael Zarathus-Cook and Hanif Abdurraqib