This was the most personal of the books I've read by Abdurraqib. Outwardly, this is a book about basketball. It's cleverly divided into four quarters, each punctuated by a clock running down from 12:00 and peppered with time-outs. It's about the teams and the athletes that consumed a generation "coming up" in Ohio in the '90s and early 2000s. But really, to me, it was a book about intersections. The way that your local teams intersect with your early life, the way that the people intersect with the teams they root for and with each other, and most of all, the way that we intersect with home.

It was both the most poetic (disclaimer: I have not read his books of poetry) and the most intensely political of the books by him that I've read. The freewheeling journey through family, work, homelessness, and prison was candid, but not without reserve. LeBron's return to Cleveland and the Cavs' eventual championship title in 2016 are woven into a complex tapestry of yet-unvindicated violence (Henry Green, Tamir Rice), homesickness, and the strength of community. When I first moved to Ohio in 2014, I was given David Giffels' The Hard Way on Purpose, which was blurbed by The Black Keys' Patrick Carney, calling Akron "a hard place to be from". Abdurraqib makes no such claim. Obviously, the hard knocks are everywhere between the lines, but the book shines as a paean to that derided, undesired home in the "Heart of it all". I loved reading that love of place and people, so strong that it can make even a Nike commercial beautiful.