Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet as well as an essayist, and he brings a lyrical style to his latest book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. While the subtitle might discourage non-basketball fans from cracking the cover, this work is more of a meditation on the narrative of uplift than anything else.

Abdurraqib does write about basketball—whether that’s players from his neighborhood whom the reader has never heard of or LeBron James—but he does so in service of the idea of ascension. He’s questioning the narrative that white people want to tell about African Americans—and other minorities, but primarily Black people—overcoming difficult odds to succeed, whatever they need that success to look like at that moment. Thus, he celebrates the people from his neighborhood, city, and even state, who were great, if only for a moment, some of whom never went any further.

In fact, he not only celebrates individuals, but the place he is from. Abdurraqib loves his neighborhood, and he loves Columbus (and Cleveland, as well, when it comes to basketball), and Ohio. That love shines through in every section of the book—he’s structured it like a basketball game, complete with the clock counting down—and it’s difficult for the reader not to share that love by the end.

The people and places Abdurraqib loves don’t have to be anything other than what they are; by implication, neither does the reader and the places they love.

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There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib. Random House, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link’s collection of short stories, draws from Grimm’s fairy tales and uses them as inspiration for new stories. Some of those new stories are quite contemporary, while some read very much like the fairy tales that inspire her—most are a mix of that feeling. For example, the final story, “Skinder’s Veil” is based on “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but it tells the story of Andy, a graduate student who hasn’t been working on his dissertation. A friend from graduate school offers him a three-week housesitting job at a rural home in Vermont. There are rules, though, in that he must welcome anybody who comes to the back door, but not the front door, including Skinder himself (who seems to be Death, but that isn’t clear). As in fairy tales, Link purposefully omits important information, leaving it to the reader to decide who some characters are or what particular events or places mean. In “The White Road” (based on “The Musicians of Bremen”), for example, the white road seems to be some portal to another place, but it could also simply be the evil that exists within each of us. Though Link has modernized some of the settings and plots from Grimm’s collection of tales, humanity never seems to change.

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White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link. Random House, October 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss may cause skepticism for his claim that the major manufacturers of processed food design their products to addict consumers, his book just might convince them otherwise. He spends a few chapters early in the work to set up that idea, pulling from research into drug and alcohol addiction, but also from the tobacco industry. The food product manufacturers often ended up owning tobacco companies, in fact. Moss also digs into evolutionary biology to explain why people have such difficulty resisting processed foods, especially those that include artificial sweeteners, which our bodies haven’t adapted to. He draws on a wide range of research and experts to support his argument, yet he makes that necessary science easily accessible to the general reader. Ultimately, he points out that we can be smarter than the food product manufacturers, and that we can use our knowledge of their tricks to make wiser choices when it comes to what we eat. While he’s clear that those manufacturers are interested in nothing but making more and more money, he provides readers with ways to see through their claims, allowing people to make healthier choices for their lives.

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Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss. Random House, March 2021.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Fittingly, I read Saving Time by Jenny Odell during my Spring Break and during the shift to Daylight Savings Time. The latter exemplifies Odell’s critique of time as a construct, especially one that portrays time as a series of boxes to fill. She sees such approaches to time as problematic in two ways: 1) they help create the idea that there is an inexorable future coming; 2) they reinforce systems of control. Odell draws from a variety of subjects—apocalyptic language, incarceration, productivity, climate change, and geography, for example—to reveal how those in power use time to reinforce hierarchies, often based on race, ability, or gender, but especially socioeconomics. Odell questions the assumptions embedded in such systems, such as whether one person’s hour is actually equal to another person’s, an idea that seems to be logically true, but that Odell shows to be nothing but another construct. During my Spring Break, Odell might be pleased to see, I’m not using my time productively, at least not as typical Western societies see productivity. Instead, I’m engaging in creativity for its own sake, including writing this review. Her book isn’t self-help or time management, so readers shouldn’t expect tips for living, but they should expect Odell to help them see time—and, thus, the world—differently.

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Saving Time by Jenny Odell. Random House, March 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Amy Bloom’s memoir relates her husband’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and their struggle to find a way for him to die as he chooses rather than suffer through years of mental decline. Bloom weaves chapters from the past — as she realizes what’s happening to her husband and the revelation of his diagnosis — with those of Brian’s final days in Switzerland, as well as chapters on the challenges those who want to end their life face. Bloom writes movingly about her love for Brian, consistently reminding the reader through scenes she describes, in addition to her reflections, that her helping him die comes out of that love. As soon as he is diagnosed, Brian asks Bloom to help him, as she has always been the planner in their relationship, and he has begun to lose the ability to do that type of work. This book is a testament to their marriage and their love as much as it is an exploration of why someone would want to end their life and why the person who loves them most would want to help. It is, as the subtitle states, a memoir of love and loss, and the reader feels both equally.

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In Love: A Memory of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom. Random House, 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.