Claire Taylor peppers baseball throughout her new book, April and Back Again (a fitting title for National Poetry Month), but one of them stands out to me because it’s the first poem of hers I ever read, and it’s what enticed me to email her and ask if she’d like to put out a book together.
Published a year ago this month, “A Poem in Which Chuck Knoblauch Maybe Makes Snow” was in the journal Had, edited by Aaron Burch, which I read pretty regularly. It’s consistently excellent.
Taylor’s poem begins:
A man from Minnesota says he grew up
throwing water into the January air
and watched it turn into snowfall. Yeah sure,
I say, and tell him I grew up a fish,
not one free in the wide wild, but already
caught on the line.
I love the phrase “free in the wide wild.” It’s one of those bits that glides by so fast you might miss the unique and lovely syntax. Read the whole poem at Had and you’ll see there’s a lot of lines like that. And like anything good (including baseball), it’s only peripherally about baseball.
And … this just in! Claire will be reading at Snowfort on July 1. Mark your calendars and come out to hear Claire read and talk about her book.