North American Stadiums

Reviews

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