Spin: Tales from the Diamond by J. R. Thelín

In his moving and insightful new collection, J. R. Thelín uses stories about baseball as a lens to capture “the spin of our memories” and to take us back to a time when a young boy has heroic stature, “clean and ready for the true world/of dreams.” Though these poems evoke a Midwestern landscape of the past, they resist easy nostalgia; even in what seems to be a simpler time, “the sun [is] naked and fiery in a summer sky.” As Thelín explores family and sports, and even race, ethnicity, and social class, we are happy to follow the poet on his journey, as he notes, “before the stars/in our eyes dim.” This past remains vivid and compelling, and the promise of the game is always there, “night after night.”

–Margaret Mackinnon, author of The Invented Child and Afternoon in Cartago

There have been a lot of poems and stories about baseball, but none that explore so extensively the game as a metaphor for a life. From a father who haunts his dreams to a memory of a father and the speaker’s “spin of our memories,” where the  “spin” includes both all the stories and the literal spin of a baseball, Thelín reminds us that like Satchel Page and the Negro League, baseball gives us “one small slice of America, like the last piece of diner peach pie in a tin that goes stale, then is thrown out.” The subtext here is the “game” of human relationships, the desire to reach back into memory to define the self, though it is an endless task like a runner lamenting “I will never steal home at this rate.” And it is a task Thelín’s technical skill helps us understand our own lives, our own score.

–Richard Jackson, Author of The Heart as Framed New and Select Poems