Poetry. Sally Ball's first collection of poems is something of conversations and relationships-the connections and differences between personal life and the natural world, the Zen-like attention to suffering and knowledge. This is a work of intellectual and artistic inquiry, peeling away the delusion that something can explain our mortality and our existence. A work of scientific theory and probing questions that leave us with only one real explanation: luck.

Annus Mirabilis

Literature & Fiction

Ball, Sally

Poetry

Barrow Street Press

Poetry. "WRECK ME is a primer of emotional violence—a primer because, as these unassumingly gorgeous poems know so well, we can only be beginners when we confront our wish to be seized, transported, remade. The violence within us is everywhere in dialogue with the violence without, but nothing is romanticized here, not the wish to be wrecked, not the wish to wreck; the body is a metaphor for nothing. The language of these poems is nonetheless like the body—familiar, mysterious, vulnerable, strange. 'We love / that ravishment,' says Sally Ball of what we simultaneously fear and crave, 'we trust it.' These poems are ravishing."—James Longenbach "WRECK ME is an entrancing collection. From the first line to the last, we are tugged into a sensibility and a world as familiar as our own world, and as strange. Sally Ball leaves no line unelectrified. Each poem feels finely wrought and completely newborn, which is exactly the point of poetry."—Laura Kasischke

Wreck Me

History & Criticism

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."

Hold Sway

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ball, Sally. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ball, Sally

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ball, Sally. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Annus Mirabilis

Wreck Me

Hold Sway