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Hold Sway
Poetry. To hold on to what is in motion, or to persist at being in motion (not inert!): these are the twin goals of Ball's poems. HOLD SWAY reckons with the presence of menace or threat in daily life, even in moments when all seems well enough, or when things look beautiful. Climate anxiety, numbing corporate manipulations of our attention, crimes on both a personal and a grand scale (like being someone's knife-point hostage, or filming the police after they have killed a suspect, or the Paris attacks, or the pollution of the oceans...): all are tangled up with how to live one's American life (raising children, losing a marriage, watching tv--) as Ball seeks "a footing in hope, ... a stay."
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published May 15, 2019
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 18, 2019
Sally Ball writes: “The song of my pending extinction permits my staying alive.”
These are poems that grapple with personal anxiety and larger, “planet trouble”—political, environmental. (And they are funny too, human and tender.) They take up questions about trust, about openness, love, about what it means to thrive and/or to harm, about the effort to try to live one’s values, or to just hold on (or let go). She throws these questions up against/onto a bigger canvas making the lyric “I” large and making me think of a contemporary Whitman.
I felt as she held these troubles in mind and let her mind go to work on them that she was speaking clearly, carefully and with both a seriousness and the laugh that comes from throwing one’s hands up in the air— like here it is all of me down to my last blood—directly to me. Somehow, this book made me feel less alone, and I’m grateful.
These are poems that grapple with personal anxiety and larger, “planet trouble”—political, environmental. (And they are funny too, human and tender.) They take up questions about trust, about openness, love, about what it means to thrive and/or to harm, about the effort to try to live one’s values, or to just hold on (or let go). She throws these questions up against/onto a bigger canvas making the lyric “I” large and making me think of a contemporary Whitman.
I felt as she held these troubles in mind and let her mind go to work on them that she was speaking clearly, carefully and with both a seriousness and the laugh that comes from throwing one’s hands up in the air— like here it is all of me down to my last blood—directly to me. Somehow, this book made me feel less alone, and I’m grateful.
May 24, 2019
There is so much to admire in this collection. It is at once raw/vulnerable and assertive/insightful. Some of my favorite lines:
My heart took ten seconds of joy
from the ascendant birds and then
pulsed its caffeinated uh-uh.
I have a lovely shrink
but the mind is SO SLOW
There is no way to register
the story, I have learned,
and not evaluate the victim.
Maybe there's a new way to be nuclear
Do I trust you?
Turns out there are many territories
in which to answer this question.
I lived a couple decades
in one dooms cape
My heart took ten seconds of joy
from the ascendant birds and then
pulsed its caffeinated uh-uh.
I have a lovely shrink
but the mind is SO SLOW
There is no way to register
the story, I have learned,
and not evaluate the victim.
Maybe there's a new way to be nuclear
Do I trust you?
Turns out there are many territories
in which to answer this question.
I lived a couple decades
in one dooms cape
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews