“There’s Always This Year” by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib turns his brilliant eye and inimitable mind to arguably his most intimate memoir yet in “There’s Always This Year” — an ode to his roots with a focus particularly on the meaning of redemption, resurrection, and succeeding.

“There’s Always This Year” is scaffolded around Akron, Ohio and world basketball legend Lebron James bringing an NBA championship trophy home to the underdog, long-deprived community of Cleveland. However, as in earlier masterpieces like “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” and “Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest”, this theme only provides Abdurraqib a platform for sharing the truth about America The Great. Teaser Alert: It’s not so great.

Life has always been hard in the industrial heartland, but hard has now evolved to brutal in the age of globalism, outsourcing, austerity, libertarianism, and the demise of public services. However, Abdurraqib doesn’t just come with cheap, hot takes. Rather he shares his visceral experience of police violence and brutality, race-based injustice, a cruel, unequal, corrupt carceral system. He describes an environment where abject cycles of poverty are essentially impossible to break. Affordable housing is an oxymoron, squalid conditions with absentee landlords who only show up at eviction time. Living wage employment is out of reach, especially for those with a “background”. Banks lock their doors. Payday loan companies prey. And people ask, “Why is there so much crime in our community”? Drugs? Violence? Arson? Rage?

Amidst betrayal and disillusion, there are always rays of hope. There are occasional saviors, Kings that emerge. There is a need to erect a 10-story billboard, “We Are All Witnesses”. But, still, there will be moments of despair, abandonment, ire, anger before, finally, finally a reason to dance.

“There’s Always This Year” is remarkable. Whatever is next for Abdurraqib is sure to be another must read.

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the eARC.