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 explore the aftermath of a spiritual crisis: What if life after this one is heavenless? How might we live differently if we can discover small heavens within this flawed and imperfect earth?

In poems filled with illuminating curiosity, Abdurraqib turns his attention to the sublime beauty found in ordinary moments. From the man who lifts his window shade for a crying baby on an airplane, to the grandmother who makes and remakes her absent grandson’s bed each morning, to his friend’s young daughter who devotes herself to a newfound love of ants, Abdurraqib celebrates life’s quiet pleasures while refusing to overlook the hells humanity has created.

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