Throughout both my undergrad and my Master's, my primary interests have lain in the study of popular culture. Hanif Abdurraqib's writing so beautifully illuminates why: because it tells us so much about the quotidian, about the personal, about how mass-produced art touches us in profound ways. Abdurraqib does not simply write about music or sports; he writes about being Black in America, about love, about loss, about growing up. Pop culture is how he, like so many of us, makes sense of the world and his position in it. His writing is lyrical but clear and deeply insightful. It's no surprise that he's a poet, though his prose certainly isn't flowery or inaccessible. He just has such a masterful command of language, and so it's not only a joy to read his thoughts on Fall Out Boy or Serena Williams, it is delightful to marvel at his technical ability. Though he grapples with many unpleasant truths - about premature deaths, about police brutality, about the insidiousness of racism and Islamophobia in their many forms - there is something life-affirming about his writing. He searches for the good while remaining realistic about the presence of the bad. It's exactly the collection of essays that needed to be written in this Trumpian era, and that demands to be read and felt deeply when we are close to losing hope.
