Collisions at Home

Like a good pitcher, poet Philip Theibert keeps the reader off balance. He tantalizes with witty light-as-air offerings, then brushes us back with blazing lyric chin-music. Just as we lean in to pick up some comic narrative subtext, he plunks us with a merciless poem about love. Theibert is unrivalled in his use of baseball metaphors to comment on some larger issue. But he is particularly appealing in that, in many of his poems, baseball is the issue: the reader relives haunting midnight bus rides with career minor leaguers ... recognizes the hollowness in the plink of an aluminum bat ... witnesses the penetration of a man's obsession with baseball into every aspect of his life: family, career, relationships. Philip Theibert's Collisions at Home does what poetry is supposed to do. These poems illuminate and delight. They're accessible as a slow hanging curve, wicked as a scorching liner in the gap.