I'm Always Looking Up And You're Jumping - Poems

A deeply moving poetry collection about grief, love, and the heavens and hells we create on earth, from the New York Times bestselling author of There’s Always This Year

Your heartbreak may one day grow wide as a desert
where nothing survives, but consider this: elsewhere, a child drowns in wonder

After the publication of two award-winning essay collections, Hanif Abdurraqib makes his long-awaited return to poetry to mine the aftermath of a spiritual crisis: What if life after this one is heavenless? How might I live differently if I can find small heavens on this flawed, faulty earth?

In poems of illuminating curiosity, Abdurraqib turns his attention to the sublime beauty in ordinary life. From the man who lifts his window shade for a crying baby on an airplane, to the grandmother who makes and unmakes her absent grandson’s bed every morning, to his friend’s young daughter who decides to devote herself to a newfound love of ants, Abdurraqib attends to life’s simple pleasures—while also refusing to ignore the hells that we have created on earth.

Through I’m Always Looking Up And You’re Jumping, master poet Hanif Abdurraqib crafts a devastating yet uplifting reflection of the essential contradictions that come with the experience of being human—the immense pain and suffering we feel and inflict upon others and the overwhelming goodness that exists within all of us.