North American Stadiums

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Winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace--the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.

"You were supposed to find God here / the signs said." In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small--of a city, of a family, of a shirt--is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field "lit like the heart / of the night," black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd.

A map "bleached / pale by time and weather"--and "an engrossing urban pastoral" (Washington Post)--North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.

Reviews

Praise for North American Stadiums

[Chambers] records vivid details and creates an engrossing urban pastoral. . . . These distinctive poems deserve a wide audience.Washington Post

A book of landscape and memory, of travel and grit, North American Stadiums is more like the act of penance than anything else I have ever read. . . . Smokestacks and forges, winter and jackknives, bodies broken, exhausted and fragilethese images, repeated throughout the collection, insist upon an interrogation of beauty, savor the hard details, speak always with a tang of blood. . . . Above all, these poems seek to remember, record, and perhaps be forgiven along the way.Kenyon Review

Fabulous . . . Each page is a breathing scene. . . . If memory serves anyone it certainly serves Chambers best, because its impossible to stop reading this work. This should be the start of something big.Washington Independent Review of Books

An exceptional debut collection about miracles, memory, and wanderlust . . . [Chambers is] a promising voice.Colorado Review

The collection serves as a map to some of Americas more overlooked places of industry, specifically within the Midwest and central New Yorkplaces bleached / pale by time and weatherand as an exploration of the grace we might find in such spaces.Poets & Writers

Exquisite . . . Chambers executes a kind of magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation. . . . A crackling first act by a promising new poet.Booklist

These are poems of memory and longingcompelling, lyrical, andunsettling. The furniture provided to memory is of the vistas,subway cars, and closed windows of different cities. The unsettling feelingcomes with the revelation that for all the urban inventory, this is anAmerican pastoral. A spacious glimpse of an old adventure: a poetpushing toward his own frontier. And Chambers is awonderful poet, equal to the task.Eavan Boland

This powerful, absorbing first book has the sound and feel of a younger generation.Brilliant language, intelligence, and feeling makeNorth American Stadiumsmatter.Factory lights, border patrol, gin, handguns, smoke stacks, and war are the geography of many of these eloquent poems, but the solitary poet is always scrutinizing the world with the eyes of a lover.HenriCole

You can tell from the opening notes that Chambers has chops. He can be rhapsodica Midwest rhapsody that includes light from port cranes and train horns in the Twin Cities. He can be elegiaches a genius at departures and fingering the bones in the reliquaries of the open road. Hes got the travelers wandering [wondering] instinct and the [in] dwellers intimacy. At work is a severe moral imagination and a filmic imagination shining with something living / while it burns. What a privilege it is to receive the dispatches of this exceptional book.Bruce Smith

The poems of Grady Chambers fill me with so much pleasure. Intimate histories that never shy away from their speakers complicity in sorrow but also in wonder. These are poems rooted in an idea we call America that understand what cost that naming comes with. What does it mean to make a pastoral of work youve never done Chambers drives a stake into the heart of the patronizing pastoral we make of backbreaking work and unforgiving labor. What he comes up with A poetry of the next chapter in our countrys search for meaning.Gabrielle Calvocoressi

These poems reminded me in the best way of Denis Johnson, Walt Whitman, Philip Levine, and even Jack Kerouac. ReadingNorth American Stadiumsreminded me that there is always room, infinite room, for another great new poetic voice, a young soul searching for emotional truth, probing with sensitive emotion the hidden American places. As a matter of fact, Id say we need this book right now. We need this new voice.David Means

Author Bio

Grady Chambers was born and raised in Chicago. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, attended the MFA program at Syracuse University, and has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His writing has appeared in Adroit Journal; Diode Poetry Journal; Forklift, Ohio; Nashville Review; Ninth Letter; New Ohio Review; and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.