What I’ve Been Reading This Week:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Three books which, for one reason or another, eluded me. One, I was supposed to pick up at an author signing at AWP, but I missed the window, for some forgotten reason. Another that came out while I was in the throes of a year without employment. Three books by two authors who are not only former The Line Break<\/em> guests, but have proven to be cool and fun hangs irl, too. I\u2019m talking, of course, about It\u2019s not over once you figure it out<\/em> by Isaac Pickell and Aisle 228<\/em> and Diorama<\/em> by Sandra Marchetti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not over once you figure it out<\/em> by Isaac Pickell:<\/strong> it feels like it won\u2019t be long before Bob and I are saying we knew Isaac when. The Cave Canem fellow is a poet\u2019s poet, crafting these dense bricks that aren\u2019t so heavy you can\u2019t carry them, but you know you\u2019ve got a bag of bricks slung over your shoulder. If you follow Isaac on Bluesky or Substack, as I do, you know that he is a constantly writing poet who is constantly wrestling with \u201cdisparate\u201d parts of his own identity. He\u2019s an anti-Zionist Jewish man, he\u2019s a white-passing Black man, and our stupid society doesn\u2019t make being those things easy. How this plays out on the page is long poems with heady concepts that don\u2019t read as concrete immediately\u2014nothing as simple as plums in an icebox, here\u2014but are actually devastatingly, brutally of the present moment. The effect is not unlike reading a good David Roth column, in poem form. At various points in the book, the pages slowly fade from white to black, with blink-and-you\u2019ll-miss-them stanzas in white text. It\u2019s as if something essential is trying to get to the surface, is being held down, but is too strong to permanently contain. That\u2019s almost how each line of poetry functions, too, reaching for tendril after connective tissue in ways that always feel necessary. It\u2019s impressive stuff, read this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aisle 228<\/em> by Sandra Marchetti:<\/strong> if it\u2019s sports poetry, I\u2019m almost predestined to like it, unless we\u2019re getting into some hokey, Robert Frost-by-way-of-Rick-Reilly stuff. Sandy\u2019s book about Cubs fandom, family, Wrigley Field, baseball fields in the United States, history, suffering for sports, the 2016 World Series, and more Cubs fandom is sports poetry I love. I\u2019ll get into what I like about Sandy\u2019s style when I talk Diorama. Right now, I want to talk about how underrated sports poetry is. Now that sports fandom is mostly dudes being fake GMs, gambling, and half-cocked gym bro conspiracy theories, sports poetry feels more and more important. Give me the feeling of watching your favorite team, make me feel the agony and ecstasy by using music image metaphor. Besides, as corny as the dude is, Aaron Sorkin was extremely correct to write \u201chow can you not be Romantic about baseball?\u201d You got to. Sandy knows it, that\u2019s the epigraph of this book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Diorama<\/em> by Sandra Marchetti:<\/strong> decidedly not a baseball book, here, Sandy\u2019s poetic skills need some praise. She writes these tight, compact poems that feel delicate and yet built for all terrains. These poems remind me a little of Elizabeth Willis, whose book Meteoric Flowers was once described by classmate as \u201cidk, these poems are little flowers with the power of a meteor. What else do you want me to say?\u201d The overarching theme here is influence and ekphrasis, Sandy is consciously writing about other poets and artists she likes in ways that feel like making a diorama. \u201cHere\u2019s my version,\u201d some of these poems seem to say. \u201cBoth tribute and original, collapsed into miniature.\u201d These poems rip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We’re doing a bunch of videos this week! Have fun! Happy Friday! The first one is serious<\/p>\n\n\n\n The occupation of Chicago has a $2 million per day price. The homie H Kapp-Klote asks what Chicagoans could do with $2 million per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"books,](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_6515-1024x587.jpg\")