Better Than Throwing Stones by Jan Ball

Ball’s most recent book flings the reader right into a collage of her many life stories, including glimpses into flickering churches, children’s games, books read and journeys between continents.  Fruits and fragrances, mind and memory, teaching and learning all come together in a magical arc of a book that leaps seamlessly between worlds near and far, sacred and secular. Ball’s book is peppered with allusions to films and novels, as one who is equally at ease with sea creatures and doppelgangers, and who delights in spinning a tale or two, or ten, for the adventurous reader and armchair traveler.

–Donna Pucciani, poet, author of EDGES

So what IS better than throwing stones? Jan Ball gives us numerous ideas from a stint as a nun, marriage, parenting, teaching, traveling, reading, and research to having weird dreams. And turning a poet’s eye onto everything and every place. She takes us on a journey from her Chicago childhood in yellow keds through the novitiate, on to London, Australia, the South of France and back to Chicago. We watch from the sidelines as she subs in a special education class and teaches English to soldiers from the UAE. Her insights are often enriched with references to literature and popular culture.

I especially appreciate her talent for irony, as when the priest falls dead in the sanctuary just after passing the station of the cross called “Jesus is Condemned to Die” and her unusual juxtapositions, such as comparing the Pope with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Jan also has a gift for simile, e.g., “I suddenly feel that I could scurry as fast / as a silvery sand crab.” And if you want a few laughs, you will find them too, and not only in “one more mouse poem.”

–Wilda Morris, workshop chairperson of Poets & Patrons of Chicago, and author of Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant, Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick; and (forthcoming, The Unapproved Uncle.