North American Stadiums

by Grady Chambers Narrated by Grady Chambers

Overview

Winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace-the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.

“You were supposed to find God here / the signs said.” In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small-of a city, of a family, of a shirt-is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field “lit like the heart / of the night,” black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd.

A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for North American Stadiums

 

“[Chambers] records vivid details and creates an engrossing urban pastoral. . . . These distinctive poems deserve a wide audience.”—Washington Post

 “A book of landscape and memory, of travel and grit, North American Stadiums is more like the act of penance than anything else I have ever read. . . . Smokestacks and forges, winter and jackknives, bodies broken, exhausted and fragile—these images, repeated throughout the collection, insist upon an interrogation of beauty, savor the hard details, speak always with a tang of blood. . . . Above all, these poems seek to remember, record, and perhaps be forgiven along the way.”—Kenyon Review

 “Fabulous . . . Each page is a breathing scene. . . . If memory serves anyone it certainly serves Chambers best, because it’s impossible to stop reading this work. This should be the start of something big.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

 “An exceptional debut collection about miracles, memory, and wanderlust . . . [Chambers is] a promising voice.”—Colorado Review

 “The collection serves as a map to some of America’s more overlooked places of industry, specifically within the Midwest and central New York—places ‘bleached / pale by time and weather’—and as an exploration of the grace we might find in such spaces.”—Poets & Writers

 “Exquisite . . . Chambers executes a kind of magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation. . . . A crackling first act by a promising new poet.”—Booklist

 “These are poems of memory and longing—compelling, lyrical, and unsettling. The furniture provided to memory is of the vistas, subway cars, and closed windows of different cities. The unsettling feeling comes with the revelation that for all the urban inventory, this is an American pastoral. A spacious glimpse of an old adventure: a poet pushing toward his own frontier. And Chambers is a wonderful poet, equal to the task.”—Eavan Boland

 “This powerful, absorbing first book has the sound and feel of a younger generation. Brilliant language, intelligence, and feeling make North American Stadiums matter. Factory lights, border patrol, gin, handguns, smoke stacks, and war are the geography of many of these eloquent poems, but the solitary poet is always scrutinizing the world with the eyes of a lover.”—Henri Cole

 “You can tell from the opening notes that Chambers has chops. He can be rhapsodic—a Midwest rhapsody that includes light from port cranes and train horns in the Twin Cities. He can be elegiac—he’s a genius at departures and fingering the bones in the reliquaries of the open road. He’s got the traveler’s wandering [wondering] instinct and the [in] dweller’s intimacy. At work is a severe moral imagination and a filmic imagination ‘shining with something living / while it burns.’ What a privilege it is to receive the dispatches of this exceptional book.”—Bruce Smith 

“The poems of Grady Chambers fill me with so much pleasure. Intimate histories that never shy away from their speaker’s complicity in sorrow but also in wonder. These are poems rooted in an idea we call America that understand what cost that naming comes with. What does it mean to make a pastoral of work you’ve never done? Chambers drives a stake into the heart of the patronizing pastoral we make of backbreaking work and unforgiving labor. What he comes up with? A poetry of the next chapter in our country’s search for meaning.”—Gabrielle Calvocoressi

 “These poems reminded me in the best way of Denis Johnson, Walt Whitman, Philip Levine, and even Jack Kerouac. Reading North American Stadiums reminded me that there is always room, infinite room, for another great new poetic voice, a young soul searching for emotional truth, probing with sensitive emotion the hidden American places. As a matter of fact, I’d say we need this book right now. We need this new voice.”—David Means

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160154183
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Series:	Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Explaining the Resurrection in Simple Words

A blessing can be the act of invoking divine protection,
or a favor or gift bestowed by god,
and I don't know how to define mercy,
but the field is lit like the heart of the night, gnats flitting above the crosshatched grass,
huge shadows of the ballplayers in stadium light whistling in signals from the outfield.
The wind lifts and settles our shirts against our skin,
and you ask after my day:
there'd been pinwheels spinning on a rain-soaked lawn, pigeons cooing and nesting in the gutters.
I'd pressed my back to the dark damp wood of the trunk.
Yellow flowers fell on me.

***

Another Beauty I Remember

Somewhere in South Chicago the millwrights and welders of US Steel are leaving their masks to hooks and lockers and shining out into evening still covered in dust.
Those men do not belong to me, their world of arc and fire, but many nights I have loved them.

*

When I was seventeen my friends and I rode each weekend toward the Indiana border. One drove, another worked the dials on the radio, and I drank gin in the back and ordered us to slow over the toll bridge to peer down at the barge lights roaming the Calumet River,
then up to where the smokestacks of US Steel rose like an organ in a church. Gin, fire, the workers coming off their shifts, light lighting up the metal-dust spread along their shoulders like the men had all walked through plate glass windows.

*

Their dust does not belong to me, but many nights I have loved them.
They do not live where I was born, north of the mammoth glass residences of the Gold Coast where the worst news was soon mended: a neighbor girl's bone broken in a fall. A garage fire sullying the air over Broadway and Balmoral. I did not know their sons: the Byrnes, the Walshes, the Mansekies of Bridgeport and Fuller Park. The green parade and the green river and the pride of the Irish. Laughter, bright balloons over cracked asphalt, yellow hair and sunlight, all the families singing songs of another country.

*

I keep taking the long road back to that summer because the image won't leave me:
weekend evenings, gin and driving south, smoke blasting from the factory stacks,
the men glancing up at the flash of our passing.
We were going to spend all night drinking gin on an Indiana beach. Dust had settled like fragments of a hand grenade, like silver wings across the backs of the men. We were going to tell each other what was beautiful.

*

The dark water was beautiful. The fire drowning the air with smoke, our voices drowned by the sound.
I stood at the edge of the water where the coastline stretched from my left and curved enough north that the stitch of factory lights looked like they were shining from the far side of the lake.
We burned traces into the air with the burning tips of sticks poked into the heart of fire.
We all said the sky was beautiful. Our bodies light against the water.

*

Somewhere in South Chicago the millwrights and welders of US Steel are leaving their masks to hooks and they are going home. What did I know then? What did I know of the beauty of the men? Driving past, I watched just long enough to see them stepping out of their shifts,
believing them angelic, knowing not a thing about their lives, each of them, perhaps, seeing what I saw: light coming off the backs of the others as they drifted into the lot, but knowing the light I saw was dust,
not wings, and, knowing to call it dust,
calling it dust.

***

The Window

This was my routine: I woke, and in the morning carried my houseplants to the courtyard,
three small succulents potted in a wooden box.
Each evening I returned to retrieve them.

When a neighbor inquired
I explained that I did this to give the plants sun and air.
Her manner suggested she perceived my action to be unusual-I suspected she'd been watching for some time.

Soon after, the rains came.
What little light there was only made visible the water that had been falling invisibly all night.
The daily journey from the kitchen to the courtyard became unnecessary.

Here I should explain something about the room in which I lived.
It was small, three walls and a door,
but one whole wall was a window.
The view was of the courtyard and across it, windows into the rooms on the yard's far side: blinds, reflections,
individual panes the width and length of coffins.

In time I became interested in a window opposite my own.
It was like the others in most respects, except all day a curtain was drawn across it. Light burned from behind it all hours of the night.

Evenings I positioned my chair behind the blinds-

night came. One by one the windows glowed on the building opposite.
One by one they were extinguished except the one I watched.

I recall a night-light I was given as a boy,
a moon the size of my hand illuminated by a slim bulb.

The light shined through the moon; the moon's plastic softened the light.
In the sky, the white moon.
In the corner of my room, the small moon appeared yellow. The window

came to seem connected: the way the curtain held and thickened the light,
how the light made the weight of the curtain apparent.

Reading back, I see that I have omitted certain important details-

many nights had passed; the curtain remained closed.
What I knew of the room I knew only from the shadows cast by the objects inside-

a headboard,
maybe,
a spray of stems.
I never saw anyone.

I never saw anyone,
but I knew the room was occupied: the shade of the light sometimes altered, bright or dim depending on the night,
like a pulse.

I lay in bed. The rain erased the world,
then slowed,
and the world's noise returned-
trickling water; the hum coming from the walls.
Days passed. A stain formed on the sill's tile around the outline of the box of plants.

The window, as I have said, often remained lit late into the night. When I saw it, I would rise and turn on my own. If the window darkened,
mine did too. In this way, I felt, we came to form a kind of correspondence.

At the courtyard's center sat a round glass table, four chairs tilted toward it, like people conspiring.

A pool of water formed across its surface,
blue in the evening, pale in the day, the sky moving inside it. Each night before sleep,
my eyes traveled from the window to the table, from the table to the shape of each vacant chair, the darkness filling the absent forms.

***

Salt Lake

Noon turned everything white-
heat-
and empty-
shadows walked back inside their trees.

You were supposed to find God here,
the signs said-

West Jordan, Zion, there

where the first Saints were fed into the Valley by the Range.

Dusk drowned the canyon's gashes-

dawn brought them back-

then all that sunlight. All that

brown burnt trackside brush.
Kids by the roadside,
I remember-blue snow cones in white paper cups.

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