That’s baseball: elusive, uneasy, and mortal. Part of what brought many of us to the sport was the sense of intimacy we felt with players who came in all sizes, from almost every kind of community. We saw and heard from ballplayers every day, on the radio or in the news, and we grasped that foundational to this challenging sport was how they metabolized the possibility of failure—a seminal feature not just of their lives but of ours.
As a developmental psychologist who writes dark thrillers on the side, I find the intersection of psychology and fear intriguing. To explain what drives this fascination with fear, I point to the theory that emotions evolved as a universal experience in humans because they help us survive. Creating fear in otherwise safe lives can be enjoyable – and is a way for people to practice and prepare for real-life dangers.
It is a mistake, probably, to seek consonance in the work of several poets whose contributions to Poetry Business’ latest anthology are nothing if not eclectic. Yet there are contiguous stylistic threads in this fine, slim volume, whose presence may or may not be a consequence of the judicious application of editorial inference. Since most of us are given instinctively to the combing out of knots, it is satisfying to find verisimilitude in such a disparate selection of poems, even where the likeness is otherwise residual.
Like its predecessor, The Sequel is a novel about stories; an on-the-nose satire about the cut-throat publishing industry, and a Chinese puzzle of books-within-books and deliberately placed literary references for the cognoscenti.
Bret Shepard’s achingly beautiful collection of poems, winner of the prestigious Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, is informed throughout by his childhood growing up in villages on Alaska’s North Slope, including Atqasuk and Browerville. The poems are infused with landscape imagery and a sense of loss. The words “absence” and “desire” appear again and again.