Losing Season — In Bookstores Now!
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Losing Season by Jack Ridl
Hoops Lit: Poems from a Coach’s Kid
Book Release, September, 2009
Contact: Florenz Eisman, 201-670-9065, cavankerry@optonline.net
Glen Rock, N.J. — The archetypal American experience of high school sports is the singular focus of LOSING SEASON (CavanKerry Press; September 2009; $16.00, paperback), Jack Ridl’s new collection of poems that chronicle a year of hope and defeat on and off the basketball court in a small town. In a series of spare, unguarded lyrics, the poet—a retired college English professor who was named one of the 100 most influential sports educators in America by the Institute for International Sport—burrows beneath the skin of an array of participants: coach, players, family, fans. The composite picture he creates underscores how the central metaphors we draw from sports guide our everyday glories and frustrations.
LOSING SEASON “is unmatched, I believe, anywhere in American poetry,” says poet Conrad Hilberry. “It brings to the world of high school basketball the sort of authority, the sure nuance and detail that the film Bull Durham brought to minor league baseball. I’ve never seen a poetry book as clearly focused as this one, as though a smart documentary filmmaker had hung around the gym all season filming until we can see and feel every hole and knot in the sad fabric of that failed year. These poems are so compelling, so varied, so familiar to anyone who has felt the impact of high school sports that they may well introduce a new genre.”
Ridl, himself the son of University of Pittsburgh and Westminster College basketball coach C. G. “Buzz” Ridl, brings a lifetime of participation and observation to these trenchant poems. Divided in four quarters, like a game itself, the poems trace a cycle of hope and disappointment as lived by the high school team. From the “First Cut” (“Twenty-two/would go to look, hoping/to find themselves among/the chosen.”) to the “Last Game” (“`You/think we’ll beat these/guys tonight?’ `Not a/chance.’ `Where you want/your ashes?’ `Scattered.’”), the season unfolds with a forced confidence quickly tempered by resignation.
At the center of the drama is the coach himself, who “At Fifty” “hurls the ball against the garage door,/grabs it on the rebound. He’s missed ten/in a row.” Now in middle age, he struggles with the tension between his devotion to his job and his marriage (“Coach’s Wife”) and the widening gap between himself and his daughter (“Coach Losing His Daughter”). Daily encounters with the testosterone-fueled exuberance of his team (“Shower”) only serves to remind him of his own waning virility.
And last night when
he looked in the mirror, he saw standing
there behind him, a high school forward,
ball on hip, hair slick and black, eyes
determined to stare down anyone stuck
with guarding him. He thought of
his letter sweater and the day he was
named the coach. Then he felt a hand
on his hip, an elbow heading toward his gut.
(from “On a Day in Early March”)
The players themselves—be they Star or Scrub—harbor their own internal quarrels and dreams, as does the Coach’s restless daughter. A small local coterie clings to the team’s miserable season—from the equipment man and bus driver to the town’s shop owners and the school’s principal—each placing his misguided optimism in the team’s inevitable fate.
“LOSING SEASON isn’t just a great book of poetry, for it is much more than that,” says Richard Jones. “It is more like the Great American Novel we have long hoped would grace our literary landscape.” Extracted from real life, infused with insight, and shaped from the sweat of body and soul, Jack Ridl’s poems are muscular, American, and wholly original.
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About Jack Ridl
Jack Ridl is the author of several collections of poetry including Broken Symmetry, selected by The Society of Midland Authors as co-recipient of their award for the best book of poems published in 2006. He has published in such literary journals as Ploughshares, Poetry East, The Colorado Review and Poetry. He also has coauthored several textbooks with Peter Schakel. Ridl has received awards for his teaching including the CASE/Carnegie Foundation Award as Michigan Professor of the Year. In 2007, he was named one of the 100 most influential educators in the world of sport by The Institute for International Sport. Ridl is the son of acclaimed basketball coach Buzz Ridl. A former point guard, Ridl’s jump shot has faded.
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CavanKerry Press would appreciate two tearsheets
of any review or feature you publish about this book.
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LOSING SEASON by Jack Ridl
Publication Date: September 2009
Price: $16.00; ISBN: 978-1-933880-15-0
Distributed by: UPNE, 1-800-421-1561
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All of Jack’s books can be ordered through your local bookseller, and especially the Hope-Geneva Bookstore. Call: 616.395.7833 or 1.800.946.4673, email: bookstore@hope.edu
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