COLUMBUS, Ohio — “You will surely forgive me if I begin this brief time we have together talking about our enemies,” reads the opening of Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest book. “There’s Always This Year” is part sports memoir, part love letter to the city that raised him, and he thought the line might be off-putting. But it’s a sentence that tugs on your hand; it draws you into the inner circle. After all, the passage goes on, “to talk about our enemies is to talk about our beloveds.”
But more on that later. On this night, in early March, the enemy was the Chicago Fire Football Club. For Abdurraqib, for everyone gathered in the section known as the Nordecke, the enemy stood on the field — their backs to the stands packed with fans in yellow and black and, for some reason, the odd Star Wars costume.
Abdurraqib has loved few things as long as he has loved his city’s Major League Soccer team. He was about 12 when the Crew arrived in Columbus, and he was instantly drawn to such players as Jeff Cunningham and Dante Washington. “I didn’t know Black people played soccer like this,” he remembered thinking back then. “They became my guys.” His mother died in 1997, in the middle of their second season, and the team became a full-blown obsession — something to pour his mind into. As a teen, unable to afford tickets, he and his friends snuck into the stadium. In his 20s, he worked selling concessions. “I was a bad hot dog vendor, but almost anyone could do it,” he said. “Occasionally you get some extra cash, and, more importantly, you get to take hot dogs home. And I could be in the arena.
Abdurraqib, an award-winning poet and essayist, is now a season-ticket holder. In February, along with the founder of Jeni’s Ice Cream, he was asked to model the Crew’s new home jersey. But for the next long while, he won’t get to attend any games. He will be on the road for the new book, out March 26.
“There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” is deeply rooted in Ohio, and explores the intense sense of affinity and mutual betrayal that can exist between a person and their hometown. The narrative is structured like a basketball game: divided into quarters, numbered headings counting down from 12 minutes, with “timeouts” where the flow of prose is punctuated by verse. The book is partly about LeBron James and his 2010 split from the Cleveland Cavaliers — but it’s also about the star player from Abdurraqib’s old neighborhood, Kenny Gregory, who never did make it to the NBA. Centrally, it’s about who makes it and why, and what “making it” even means. Where Abdurraqib is from, people assume “making it” means leaving.
“As someone who has never really wanted to leave, it began to create this question for me of: Am I grappling with some kind of disordered affection?” Abdurraqib said. “Everyone I love at some point has been like, ‘I want to get out of here.’ And I’m like, ‘This is the here. This is the only here that I want. Flaws and all.’”
Things didn’t look promising at the break, with a score of 0-0. We all started to feel the cold. Per Abdurraqib, the Crew generally play strongest in the first half and allow heartbreaking goals to slip through in the second. (An unspoken factor: He had violated at least two of his superstitious rituals while participating in this interview — fasting just before a game and throwing his arm around the neighboring person for the traditional singalong of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”) He went in search of gloves, maybe a pretzel, and wanted to say hi to some old friends. As he headed downstairs, a mom nudged the two boys in her care, whispering: That’s Hanif Abdurraqib.
“Success” — Abdurraqib put the word in quotes — has been useful in at least this one way: “It tricks people into thinking you can do anything you like.” When he pitched “There’s Always This Year,” his second book with Penguin Random House, there was more trust — an air of, if you say you can do this, we believe you — even as its scope morphed and its structure flipped. Ben Greenberg, who edited the book with Maya Millett, said via email that he’d learned not to get too attached to a project’s original pitch with Abdurraqib. Initially, the book was supposed to center more firmly on LeBron — but this time, Greenberg wrote, “I knew what to expect (as in, don’t expect what I might expect), and gave myself over far more readily to his vision.”
Something definitely changed in the last few years. Abdurraqib has a hard time identifying it. Certainly his national reputation has grown: In 2021, he won the MacArthur “genius” grant, and his book on the history of Black performance, “A Little Devil in America,” was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Correspondingly, his world in Columbus shrank — or at least became more crowded, more thickly populated by strangers who recognize him by sight.
“I guess I don't really think about how the city thinks of me,” Abdurraqib said, during our earlier, unlucky bite to eat at a nearby food hall.
“You don’t?” I asked. Fifteen minutes ago, a teacher at his old high school had stopped by to apologize for missing his reading and to chat about student tickets for Abdurraqib’s next event.
“It’s best that I don’t,” he amended. “I love it here — and it’s a little bit strange here for me sometimes. It’s a bit stranger than it was in, say, 2020 or 2019. There’s a level of pride in that, and I’m grateful for that. But there’s also a —” He winced. “Did I tell you about the mural?”
He didn’t need to tell me about the mural — the one of his face, painted highlighter-bright above a quote from his 2017 essay collection. I’d seen photos of it on the internet. More subtly, the nearby King Arts Complex — where Abdurraqib had gone to summer camp and had his first kiss — put his name on a brick on its walkway.
Abdurraqib feels gratitude for the affection the city has for him. It can be hard to wrap his head around, though. For a stretch in his 20s, evicted from his first apartment, he lived out of a storage unit and spent some nights in jail. It’s a period he discusses at some length in the new book: “I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars,” he writes. “Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.”
“When you’re unhoused, you’re either invisible or a nuisance. So this level of visibility is strange,” he said. “But — these are my folks. So yeah, I don’t mind people coming up to me when I’m shopping and want to talk about albums. I’m in community with these people. I don’t need much more than that.”
Four years ago, he bought a home in the historically Black neighborhood of Bronzeville, where he lives with his graying dog, Wendy, and is the youngest person — and only single, childless adult — on his block. He never thought much about what a happy adulthood might look like; he never thought he would live past 25. “I really still — honestly — live in these 24-hour bursts. If I’m lucky. If I’m unlucky, if I’m struggling, then it’s like the time is condensed. Can I get through 12 hours? Can I get through eight hours? That’s always been my brain. I think it’s a bit healthier now.”
At times he’s startled to find himself in the position of village elder, shouting at kids to steer their bikes clear of traffic. “I was a kid on the streets,” he said. “I remember how people talked to me, and treated me — like I was worth survival.”
Turning 40 has made him think a lot about loneliness, and how to tend to it carefully, he said: “I want more than anything to not have any of my relationship with loneliness or isolation become anyone else’s problem. I don’t want to become harsh.” He makes sure to go out every two weeks, to buy flowers and a chai, chatting with vendors at the market. He busies himself with writing, teaching, editing and various other projects, not all of them literary — like tinkering with a broken 1938 jukebox he bought years ago.
He doesn’t know how to repair jukeboxes, he said, but “it gives me a reason to say, ‘I am alone, but I am also present with the spirit of this project. I am working to bring something back to life that has been loved by many hands before mine. Therefore, I’m not really alone at all.’”
Another thing about turning 40? “I have aged beyond a desire for suffering,” Abdurraqib said. On his long Sunday runs, he can go for 12, 14 miles, or quit after three if his body tells him he needs to sit down. Playing sports drilled into him the belief that pain was rigor, that anguish unlocked achievement. He brought that to his writing, particularly his 2017 essay collection, “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” and his 2019 poetry book, “A Fortune for Your Disaster.”
He once thought that leaning into suffering, depressing its accelerator, would yield a romantic result. Now he wonders, “What if I don’t have to? What if my best work is awaiting me through ease, and some level of pleasure?”
At minute 60, still nothing, but the Crew were finally on the attack. “I don’t think he can catch,” Abdurraqib said, studying the enemy goalie with quiet relish. “A goal would be … very pleasurable.” His guys delivered about eight minutes later, and again in overtime — sweet revenge for the lone Chicago goal, awarded upon video review. The game ended 2-1, with another rousing rendition of the song: “Wise men say … ”
It was galvanizing, a gift, this last home game before the new book landed. Abdurraqib tours books like a musician would tour an album. He calls the stops “shows” rather than “readings” — a mark of coming up through Columbus’s open mic scene, and of how seriously he takes the performance of his writing.
“Some of this is my own anxiety,” he said. “I don’t trust that what I’ve done is good enough to live in the world on its own without my animation of it being a part of its legacy.” Really, he added, “it’s hard for me to trust this book — but I think I’m getting there.”
So he’s getting ready, grounding himself in routine. With the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, he has to get his disciplines in place, he said: waking up early, getting in a run, then having a big meal and going back to sleep, before waking again at 6 in the morning. He’s going to an extra session of therapy each week. He’s watching a lot of old episodes of “Living Single.” He’ll hang out with his Columbus pals, who “know so many different versions of me that aren’t this version.” The comforts of this, he said, made it possible to live with the rest.
But there are parts of the experience he can’t really prepare for: the acute loneliness, more jagged than the loneliness he has learned to shape at home; the crash that comes from reading in front of hundreds of people and then going back alone to the hotel. He plans, each night, to phone one of his buddies on the West Coast, asking them about their day, telling bedtime stories to their kids.
When the first New York show sold out — as did the second one they added afterward, along with several other stops on the tour — Abudrraqib texted a friend: I think this one’s going to be different. “I don’t know what it is. I would like to figure it out. I mean, yeah, the audience has grown due to ‘Little Devil in America’s’ success. But it’s not just that,” he said. “All of this is wonderful. But I don’t have a good — I don’t have a good understanding of my own self. In some ways, I do — I’m emotionally aware. But I don’t know how the world sees me. It’s probably better that way.”
This idea — of the gap between the self that his readers expect and the self he knows himself to be — came up again after Abdurraqib said his goodbyes, and we drifted out of the stadium and toward his car. People expect him to be serious, he said, but “I’m not a very serious writer. I’m not a very serious person.” Writing wasn’t even in his top three interests, by his reckoning. He loved music, sports, vast collections of things: sneakers, records, vintage concert tees. Other writers get to work no matter what; he needed to feel fulfilled in the other corners of his life to work well.
“Like tonight, I could go home and write, I feel so richly fulfilled,” he said, sitting for a minute, savoring. “By getting to witness this team I love, beating a team I really hate.” Abdurraqib put the car in reverse. “And in that fashion.”