In this Book
- Stickball on 88th Street
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: Red Hen Press
summary
Comic, tragic, colorful, and adventurous, Stickball on 88th Street is a sequence of thirty-four narrative poems that follows its speaker from boyhood to college. It’s a memory book, bound with vignettes of school, family life, and the streets of New York City, as well as Maine and Mexico, culminating with a swan dive in Colorado. It reads like a novel or memoir, with characters, setting, and plot.
Stickball employs an original form, neither free verse nor traditionally formal, but rather lexical. Instead of meter and syllable counts, the book uses individual words as its units of measure. Each quatrain has twenty words: six each in the first two lines, four each in the last two lines. This form imposes no ponderous regularity, allowing for a swift narrative flow. It was written over the course of thirteen days in August, 1977, and has remained unchanged since then.
Table of Contents
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- The Building
- pp. 11-12
- Icepicks on 93rd Street
- pp. 13-14
- Stickball on 88th Street
- pp. 21-23
- Lucy Thibodeau
- pp. 24-26
- A Bloody Saturday Night
- pp. 27-29
- Leah Scott
- pp. 30-31
- Sammy Propp
- pp. 32-33
- Donald Franklyn Pierce
- pp. 34-35
- Snow in the Gully
- pp. 39-40
- Overnight Train
- pp. 44-46
- Street People
- pp. 49-51
- The Family
- pp. 57-58
- Neil the Elevatorman
- pp. 64-65
- White Nights
- pp. 84-85
- About the Author
- p. 104
Additional Information
ISBN
9781597093323
Related ISBN(s)
9781597094771
MARC Record
OCLC
835770646
Pages
104
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No