Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing

by Natalie Díaz (Editor)

Sport has always been central to the movements of both the nation-state and the people who resist that nation-state. Think of the Roman Colosseum, Jesse Owens’s four gold-medal victories in the 1936 Nazi Olympics, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s protest at the 1968 Olympics, and the fallout Colin Kaepernick suffered as a result of his recent protest on the sidelines of an NFL game. Sport is a place where the body and the mind are the most dangerous because they are allowed to be unified as one energy.

Bodies Built for Game brings together poems, essays, and stories that challenge our traditional ideas of sport and question the power structures that athletics enforce. What is it that drives us to athletics? What is it that makes us break our own bodies or the bodies of others as we root for these unnatural and performed victories? Featuring contributions from a diverse group of writers, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Louise Erdrich, Toni Jensen, Ada Limón, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and Maya Washington, this book challenges America by questioning its games.

 
 
 

Genres: Sports, Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays

402 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2019

About the author

Natalie Díaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Her second poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poems is published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Díaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.

Reviews

[bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

happy i gave this the time and space it needed.

some of my favorite pieces:

introduction: bodies built for game by natalie diaz
takes enemy by shann ray
the church of michael jordan by jeffrey mcdaniel
federer as irreligious experience by porochista khakpour
give and go by toni jensen
as if we were called by reginald dwayne betts
dennis by kaveh akbar
the condition of being a sports fan by sue hyon bae
minor league legend by matthew olzmann
the sum of our doing by holly m wendt
who holds the stag’s head gets to speak by gabrielle calvocoressi

[Holly M Wendt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean, I'm biased in that I have an essay in this collection, but I think the pieces that Natalie Diaz and Hannah Ensor have brought together here are amazing, and I'm honored to be part of it.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This powerful collection of (mainly) North American short fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction shows the power of sport-related creative writing, and its ability to explore and unpack emotional engagements with moving bodies (our and others). It draws on a combination of new and established writers with Diaz’s engagement with and knowledge of contemporary poetry possibly shaping much of the collection. Of the 102 pieces, around ¾ are verse, just on ½ of the pieces previously published as a single issue of Prairie Schooner¸ and another 20 or so previously published elsewhere. Even so, it is great to have them pulled together into a single collection, especially when it is this strong.

Many of the writers a relatively unknown (recognising that that is pretty low bar when it comes to poetry, where aside from a few it’s a pretty specialist field), although some of the poets are widely published, and Diaz – a former McArthur Fellowship holder – and few others are well-known. Among the prose writers, most again are relatively new although there is an extract from Louise Erdrich’s La Rose and the collection includes Claudia Rankine’s essential NYT Magazine essay ‘The Meaning of Serena Williams: On Tennis and Black Excellence’.

Diaz and Ensor seem to have taken a broad view of ‘sports writing’, meaning that it is, in some cases, the subject of the piece, while in others sport becomes more metaphorical, allusive, or allegorical. Very few, if any, of the pieces are celebratory, yet many take us inside sports culture and practice, fandom and experience. There is a risk in this approach, where sport cultures are often narrowly focused – localised, national, sport specific, and often all three – yet for the most part I was able to get the references or allusions – even if it meant inferring emotion, association, or signification. A few were just beyond me – but of the 102 perhaps only 5 or 6 left me perplexed.

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of baseball, basketball and athletics (as in track and other forms of running), a good smattering of tennis, some swimming – Laura Espinoza’s ‘After Simone Manuel’s Olympic Victory in the Women’s 100m Freestyle’ is especially punchy, unpacking significance (well beyond the dead heat) and the widespread forgetting about Black swimming. There’s also chess, boxing and wrestling, and Holly Wendt’s gorgeous piece focused on her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella while her beloved (Pittsburgh) Penguins are contesting the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Much of the collection deals with youthful athletes and players, but not all. Esther Lin’s poignant ‘At Eighty-Two My Father is Learning to Walk Again’ invokes sporting discourses of recovery and aging. Other bodies no longer work as they did – in Shivanee Ramlochan’s ‘All the Flesh, Singing’ an athlete talks of a current body – twice what it was when she ran competitively – still finds the joy of running. For Joseph Miller, sport is an unreliable lover (‘Bad Love Affair’), Eugene Gloria is distressed about his capabilities in ‘The Yo-Yo Heir’s Lament’, Brett Fletcher Mauer is the assured loser, even when playing Monopoly or Uno, in ‘Sports History’, and Chip Livingstone’s ‘sneak up shoes are the same as [his] stadium mocs’. This is a rich, elegant, diverse collection.

It’s also a delight of a collection that merits revisiting, dabbling, relishing and I hope gains widespread use in sport studies classes: there is so little in academic (‘scientific’) writing that gets anywhere the affect and emotion of sport, movement and activity than we see in this writing.

[Sara Saab · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with all anthologies, a bit uneven — a dojo’s foam mat curlin up at the edges. I preferred the pieces that interrogated bodies, physicality, and game head-on, and not as much the ones that used the topics as rhetorical devices for access to some other familiar territory. There are some very fine pieces in here; Natalie Diaz’s intro essay “Bodies Built for Game” is one I’ve heard/read at least three times now, and it’s up there with Sofia Samatar’s “Skin Feeling” in my personal pantheon of formative essays. “Takes Enemy” by Shann Ray, “Summertime” by Joel Salcido, “The Condition of Being a Sports Fan” by Sue Hyon Bae, “Minor League Legend” by Matthew Olzmann, and “Cross Country” by Roger Reeves other real standouts. Very powerful to have an entire anthology of essays and poems devoted to sports and sporting by some of the lights of our English language literary scene. Again, only wish the editorial hand had been a bit more firm, as this would’ve had the potential to be dazzler after dazzler. Maybe next one a homerun.

[Arlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection surprised me. I liked the way it was edited, the essays blended pretty well with a heavy representation of poetry even though maybe I was looking more for an essay/memoir experience out of it when I picked it up. Personal favourites were Hannah Ensor's 'Mudita World Peace', Lisa Fay Coutley's 'Why to Run Racks', Porochista Khakpour's 'Federer as Irreligious Experience', the Christina Olivare interview about boxing, and Rankine on Serena Williams.

[KT]

have meant to read this for years... like any anthology, there were some real standouts (infield contrapuntal was great) and some pieces that were just not for me. i think i wanted there to be more essays than there were (there was a lot of poetry, which makes sense), but all in all i liked reading this!

(marked as to-read oct 2022)

[Michelle Simoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book! It is a compilation of essays , short stories , poems and reflections from predominantly poc folks talking about their relation to sport . I am not much of a poem person but I loved a lot of the essays . The sports in the book r so diverse as well, overall it was an enjoyable read and if someone loves sports and athletics then this is a good book to read

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I, too, am biased as I have a piece in this collection, but it's honestly a fantastic book - just look at the list of contributors - absolutely incredible

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used this anthology in my Sports Writing and Lit course at Saint Mary's College (CA) and will be using it again.