461 Minutes With...Hanif Abdurraqib

The MacArthur-grant winner's unclassifiable new book is as idiosyncratic as the author himself.

- By Giri Nathan

WHEN I MEET the poet, essayist, and critic Hanif Abdurraqib in Columbus, Ohio, it's the kind of false-alarm early-March day that lures the locals out of winter burrows and into the park with the promise of warmth and Frisbee and fishing rod. Ducks skim the reflection of a cloudless sky, and purple crocuses poke up through thawing earth. In fact, it's uncannily like a sentence from Abdurraqib's latest book: "Spring, twirling out from behind the doldrums for a brief audition, just to check and see if it's still got it-and it does."

There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is about the sport in its title, but it's equally about the passage of time, grief, and Columbus itself. Abdurraqib tells me this is his most personal work to date, a book he's intended to write for years. "It's one of those things where you have a crush on someone for so long and you finally go out on a date with them--and you just don't know what to do or you're talking too much," he says, which resulted in a first draft that was 120,000 words long. "So much of the overwriting-I can tell I was just trying to convince people to love basketball instead of listening to what I knew to be true: I was brought to this book by basketball, perhaps, but it's not a basketball book." It is more like an extended prose poem divided into four quarters with time-outs.