Hanif Abdurraqib

I don't know how Hanif Abdurraquib keeps getting better, I only know he does. This book feels the most personal, the most vulnerable, the most political and the most profound he has written. The dedication "to anyone who never wanted to make it out of the places that love them" foreshadows much of what this book is about. Ostensibly this book is about basketball, and the game has a leading role but it also serves as a metaphor. Even as a game it is more about what pulls us together, what cements a family, community, a city. And family, community, and city (Columbus and Cleveland) are the other stars of this story. But this is also about many things much less grand and more intimate, about love and loss, grief, grace, psychological and economic insecurity, and living as a Black man in a world where your life and the lives of others who look like you mean nothing and your right to be a child means less. And also the flipside of the experience of blackness, of being part of a community imbued with coded connectivity and quiet resistance. Early in the book talking about playing the dozens, "Jaylin Rose used to study his opponents, do real-time research on the motherfuckers, in the no internet 1990's no less, just so he would have some shit to say to make sure a [n word deleted] was shook. And listen, ain't that a kind of love, to say 'you are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you?"

I beseech you to listen to the audio. Like most poets, Abdurraqib reads his work as it is meant to be experienced. I plan to read it in print next because I want to linger over the language which is, at every moment, never less than magnificent.… (mais)

I am drawn to this memoir (which I almost never read) after watching an interview of the author on Pablo Torre Finds Out (video/podcast). He was just the most compelling and interesting writer/poet/critic I have listened to.

KIRKUS:

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.… (mais)