ISBN 9781733408271
My friend asks if I care about the craft of poetry.
I like to keep sentences short, like they could protect me.
I never stopped thinking about parallel lines as a metaphor for people.
I have no idea what Calculus is.
“Air Ball is deceptively easy to read, like a joke that goes by so quickly you ask yourself later if there wasn’t something life-or-death important hiding in there. It feels written from the silence that falls once the crowd is done laughing, when the blurry little questions we’d like to eternally avoid sneak back into the room. The voice of this book, which is calm, tinged with mysticism, and as dead serious as it is funny, thinks through art, ‘art,’ celebrity, what we lose when we lose, but maybe also what we gain when we lose. There is something exhilarating, after all, about throwing up an air ball, about telling a joke that bombs, about missing our target entirely, egregiously, unbelievably. Air Ball reminds me of that BeeGees song I love, when one of the miraculous Gibbs hits us with a sort of koan: I started a joke that started the whole world crying. And later, like a kind of sideways redemption, I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing.
Air Ball is deceptively easy to read, like a joke that goes by so quickly you ask yourself later if there wasn’t something life-or-death important hiding in there. It feels written from the silence that falls once the crowd is done laughing, when the blurry little questions we’d like to eternally avoid sneak back into the room. The voice of this book, which is calm, tinged with mysticism, and as dead serious as it is funny, thinks through art, ‘art,’ celebrity, what we lose when we lose, but maybe also what we gain when we lose. There is something exhilarating, after all, about throwing up an air ball, about telling a joke that bombs, about missing our target entirely, egregiously, unbelievably.”
—Courtney Bush, author of The Lamb with the Talking Scroll