The Players

February 16, 2015
Bialosky (Intruder), an editor at W.W. Norton, pens a heartfelt ode to the American suburbs and countryside as she explores the complexities of interpersonal, particularly familial, relationships. The book’s opening sequence, “Manhood,” uses baseball terminology to explore the systems and behaviors that surround boys as they grow to be men. Much of the collection concerns itself with time, not only the way its passage changes space—“They are tearing up fields where horses graze/ for designer mansions”—but also how it transforms the way we see our loved ones and ourselves: “One of us joined a support group/ or is leaving the marriage.” Through it all, Bialosky presents language that feels as personal and measured as a mother penciling her son’s height on the kitchen door frame. In “After the Storm” she writes: “The sun makes everything sharp. I pick up/ a seashell and it crumbles. My mother/ is frail. She forgets. Everything is covered/ with Post-its.” Whether its time to “jump in for one last dangerous swim” or just listen as the “cool sea rumbles,” Bialosky isn’t afraid to acknowledge life’s transience or its beauty, and she excels at both.

April 1, 2015

The poems in this fourth collection (after Intruder) from Elliot Coleman Award winner Bialosky could be considered her response to empty nest syndrome. With a title that puns on the players of a kids' baseball team as well as the players in Bialosky's family drama, the book serves as a remembrance of things and people who have played a pivotal role in her life. Filled with questions and half questions, uttered and unuttered, the poems work by oxymoron and innuendo. Bialosky muses on her son's birth and growing up as well as her own childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, also reflecting on the death of parents and of her sister (who committed suicide, as recorded in Bialosky's History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life). The final stanza in the title poem suggests the book's bittersweet territory: "The day darkens./ The season is finished./ They take off their caps." VERDICT Although several poems could be loosely considered sonnets, the collection contains mostly free verse poems composed from bits of conversation and enhanced by line breaks. Beginning in the middle of the action, the best poems move quickly to a point of resonance and stop at a near pitch-perfect ending.--C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2015
Teenagers playing serious baseball under the beaming gaze of their patiently attentive mothers and nervous, strategizing fathers is the subject of Manhood, the first sequence in Bialosky's (Intruder, 2008) fourth poetry collection. So alive and stirring are these poems of boys ripening into men as they perform a ritual of skill and competition, the lyrics gather force and dynamism like musicthink Gershwin, think Copland. These summer poems convey a wondrously intimate grandeur as Bialosky captures the pivots and pitches, lunges and slides, and the quick, cutting rhythms of game talk. Here, too, are the baselines of family, the scorekeeping of community, the perfect mesh of body and mind. Next up is a sonnet series in which Bialosky knocks our incessant busyness, anxious conformity, and hasty, digitized communication, mere static as the Earth turns and time arrows. Bialosky writes poignantly of the seashore, of life sweeping in and rushing out as a woman cares for her increasingly frail, forgetful mother while watching her son shed childhood. A sun-spangled and deep-shadowed collection in which the archetypal is laced tightly into precious, ordinary life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)