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

I'm pretty alone in this based on the reviews, but I think Hanif Abdurraqib's latest foray into the poetic memoir-and-philosophy-of-performance space which he essentially invented is his weakest. It being Hanif Abdurraqib, this meditation on basketball, Abrurraqib's lifelong fandom for it, and the game's relationship to the city of Columbus, is beautiful, melancholy, and often profoundly touching, but it felt less controlled than his previous excursions on Black art and performance. It's lovely but messy, basically, suffering from too much fluff at both the sentence level and the overarching narrative level. This diffusion hides the structure, which nominally follows the four quarters of a basketball game but at times fails to channel the content or emotional intensity of the many nonlinear narratives into something more than a series of beautifully written anecdotes or musings. There's also not quite as much basketball as I was perhaps expecting, with concomitantly more memoir, and perhaps my expectations of a different balance led me to feel ungrounded within the work. Worth reading, but far from his best.