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

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

• 
  Holly M Wendt

  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

  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.
• 
  Arlie

  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.
  
  
• 
  John

  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

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