There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

“Love and grief, basketball and growing up, prose and poetry. It's about living in a place, and staying in a place, that outsiders look down on, because it’s the place you and your people have made your home, and you love it, and why would you want to leave that, why should you be expected to want to leave that?”

“Spring equals March Madness, and this book about basketball (& life, & love, & struggle) marries poetry, prose, and non-fiction like only Abdurraquib can.”

“hanif abdurraqib is beyond a generational poet, i really can't think of anyone with such a loving and careful command of language as him. this is a really intimate read where abdurraqib shares some of the most difficult and beautiful times in his life and connects them back to ohio basketball. some little miscellaneous stuff that's really sticking with me includes: - the meditations on his father, especially the anecdote about enjoying a meal and carefully selecting a first bite ("to know that even he was at odds with his own patience, wanting to measure his ability to sprint and his ability to savor" SHEESH) - the section about lebron's defection to miami and the passages within comparing it to feeling like a jilted lover checking your ex's instagram - the notes on music... that deep dive into the vocal delivery of "my girl"'s chorus is nuts - "i'm talking about kicking down the door of some good living while i'm still alive to leap through that bountiful threshold, while i'm still alive to flash the spoils of some good living past the eyes of whoever has caused me a specific type of pain, a pain where low-stakes revenge feels not only appropriate but necessary." i love the way abdurraqib uses punctuation (cannot articulate this fully but his choice of when to use a rare exclamation mark is so punchy and turns the prose into poetry), i love how it feels like you can wring out any given sentence and get totally soaked by emotion. i loooove the mythologizing feel on sports fandom and meaning-making - sent a lot of quotes to the wrestling fans in my life”