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North American Stadiums
- Narrated by: Grady Chambers
- Length: 1 hr and 23 mins
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North American Stadiums
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Publisher's Summary
Winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.
“You were supposed to find God here / the signs said.” In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small—of a city, of a family, of a shirt—is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field “lit like the heart / of the night,” black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd.
A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.
What the critics say
“[Chambers] records vivid details and creates an engrossing urban pastoral. . . . These distinctive poems deserve a wide audience.”—Washington Post
“A book of landscape and memory, of travel and grit, North American Stadiums is more like the act of penance than anything else I have ever read. . . . Smokestacks and forges, winter and jackknives, bodies broken, exhausted and fragile—these images, repeated throughout the collection, insist upon an interrogation of beauty, savor the hard details, speak always with a tang of blood. . . . Above all, these poems seek to remember, record, and perhaps be forgiven along the way.”—Kenyon Review
“Fabulous . . . Each page is a breathing scene. . . . If memory serves anyone it certainly serves Chambers best, because it’s impossible to stop reading this work. This should be the start of something big.”—Washington Independent Review of Books