We Came to Play: Writings on Basketball (Io Poetry) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556431627 ISBN 13: 9781556431623

Publisher: North Atlantic Books, 1996

Synopsis

Setting their literary picks with the elegance of the Pearl, point guard Ross and off guard Hand have spun a masterpiece. Their roster includes some bona-fide all-stars, more than a few hall-of-famers (plus a certain ringer of two): Bill Cosby, John Updike, Jim Carroll, John R. Tunis, Tom Meschery, Roy Blount, Jr., Yusef Komunyakaa, Stanley Cohen, Susan Orlean, Madeleine Blaise, Jeremy Larner, Bill Russell, Rick Telander, Pete Axthelm, John McPhee, John Edgar Wideman, William Matthews, Woody Allen, Bill Bradley, Quincy Troupe, Al Attles, Gino Sky, John Valenti, Stephen Dunn, and many others. Hand and Ross tip their hats to Daniel Rudman whose earlier North Atlantic anthology, Take it to the Hoop, lit the way.

About this title

About the Author:

John Ross is a poet/journalist, working in Mexico. He is the author of a book about Chiapas, which won an American Book Award. He has also written many chapbooks of poetry and most recently has published journalism in The Nation. He was born in New York CIty in 1938.

Q.R. Hand, Jr. is a counselor in the San Francisco community health system. He is the author of I Speak to the Poet in Man and the forthcoming How Sweet It Is. He is also a member of the Wordwind Chorus, a group of poets and musicians who perform together. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937.

From Publishers Weekly:

With the NBA playoffs in full swing, this is a must for any basketball enthusiast or sports fan, period. We Came to Play is a collection of more than 60 stories, essays, articles and poems that straight up talk roundball. The pieces range from short journalistic articles on kids such as Stephon Marbury and Felipe Lopez, written before anyone knew who they were, to longer, thoughtful literary works by such diverse voices as John Edgar Wideman, Bill Russell, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby and John Updike. The collective covers the game in all its facets, no matter how small, such as the latest flexi-glass backboard. And if ever there were a testament to the replacement of baseball by basketball as the "nation's game," this book is it. In this setting an excerpt from Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries finds another home and truly comes alive. Though uneven at times and a little bit pretentious in some of its poems, We Came to Play deftly manages to look at the microcosm of basketball through the macrocosm of everyday life. Like jazz, country and rap music, there's something peculiarly gutsy and American about the game, and, boy, does that come out here.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: North Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1556431627
• ISBN 13: 9781556431623
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Hand Q.R., Ross John