Sports Page

It's easy to get lost in Ken Waldman's Sports Page. There is joy here, poem after poem: the easy turn of a 6-4-3 double play, the hard drop of a backhand return. The breadth of his reach is startling. Baseball and basketball, tennis and golf, fishing, swimming and even chess all find their way into the poems gathered here. Waldman transports us from the field to the press box to our own personal spaces, where we battle invisible ghosts and unlikely dreams and, sometimes, we lose. Sports Page shows us again and again the deep beauty in struggle. These are poems with fight, poems with grit, poems with genuine and unmistakable grace. --Mark D. Baumgartner, Editor, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature It's an old saying that sports doesn't build character, it reveals character. Ken Waldman's new Sports Page poems don't reveal character, they reveal America in all its complexities. This is a brilliant book, simple on the surface, but this talented poet digs deep below the artificial turf to unearth what it means to be alive today. -Rus Bradburd, author of All the Dreams We've Dreamed Poet Ken Waldman has the eye and the angle. His newest collection, Sports Page, is all live action: basketball, bowling, baseball, bullfighting. From football to fly fishing, golf to tennis, he keeps our sight on whatever is soaring, twirling, or sinking. Armchair athletes or accomplished iron men (and women), dive into these words and swim. -Marjorie Maddox, author of Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation