Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.47 AVERAGE
4.47 AVERAGE
(Thanks to Random House for the advanced copy!)
This is nominally a book about basketball, in the same way that basketball is nominally a game about basketball, but both things are really about life. “Ball is life,” they say, and they mean one thing but the other, opposite thing is implied just the same. There’s little in the way of barriers between the two, I’m saying: a faded YMCA court or the cracked asphalt of a school’s blacktop might as well be a mural to all our collective longings.
And speaking of barriers or the lack of them: For Hanif Abdurraqib, the membrane between reality and poetry is permeable and thin. In his voice, a basketball is only ever a sentence away from a sunset, or an airplane, or a city, or its people. The gift of his writing is that it makes poets out of us all, gently asking us to look around and realize the invisible lyricism that runs through everything. It can be a lot to talk or think or write that freely—it is a kind of vulnerability, after all—but Hanif grants us the permission to go there with him.
And basketball, as much as anything else, deserves to be talked and thought and written about with such freedom, with such care. It’s the perfect subject for a writer who’s always been able to see life from above the rim, reading the X’s and O’s of fast breaks and heartbreaks and slam dunks and slammed doors as pieces of a larger schematic, a pattern outside of the pattern.
In applying that kaleidoscopic view to a topic as populist as basketball, it’s possible that he could lose those people more interested in his thoughts on specific players than in how the game reminds him of his father. But I see it differently: the fact that he and his poet’s eye can spot a world of meaning superimposed over so much painted hardwood means that it was always there to be spotted; that you or I can experience the same three-dimensional, overflowing love of sport if only we have eyes to witness, if only we’re willing to lower the barriers that probably never existed in the first place. Talk about hoop dreams!
This is nominally a book about basketball, in the same way that basketball is nominally a game about basketball, but both things are really about life. “Ball is life,” they say, and they mean one thing but the other, opposite thing is implied just the same. There’s little in the way of barriers between the two, I’m saying: a faded YMCA court or the cracked asphalt of a school’s blacktop might as well be a mural to all our collective longings.
And speaking of barriers or the lack of them: For Hanif Abdurraqib, the membrane between reality and poetry is permeable and thin. In his voice, a basketball is only ever a sentence away from a sunset, or an airplane, or a city, or its people. The gift of his writing is that it makes poets out of us all, gently asking us to look around and realize the invisible lyricism that runs through everything. It can be a lot to talk or think or write that freely—it is a kind of vulnerability, after all—but Hanif grants us the permission to go there with him.
And basketball, as much as anything else, deserves to be talked and thought and written about with such freedom, with such care. It’s the perfect subject for a writer who’s always been able to see life from above the rim, reading the X’s and O’s of fast breaks and heartbreaks and slam dunks and slammed doors as pieces of a larger schematic, a pattern outside of the pattern.
In applying that kaleidoscopic view to a topic as populist as basketball, it’s possible that he could lose those people more interested in his thoughts on specific players than in how the game reminds him of his father. But I see it differently: the fact that he and his poet’s eye can spot a world of meaning superimposed over so much painted hardwood means that it was always there to be spotted; that you or I can experience the same three-dimensional, overflowing love of sport if only we have eyes to witness, if only we’re willing to lower the barriers that probably never existed in the first place. Talk about hoop dreams!
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
medium-paced
hopeful
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
cried
"Look, I love you
and so I must tell you that anything that can be taken, will be taken. You are lucky if it is sudden. You are lucky if you survive the forest of reaching hands. The open window and the aching voice that floods a room and holds you firm to the night, thinking of all you have that might be gone upon your waking."
"Look, I love you
and so I must tell you that anything that can be taken, will be taken. You are lucky if it is sudden. You are lucky if you survive the forest of reaching hands. The open window and the aching voice that floods a room and holds you firm to the night, thinking of all you have that might be gone upon your waking."