“In Sort of Gone we root for Sarah Freligh’s hard-throwing pitcher Al Stepansky even as we wish to dowse him with a cup of beer. How else can we respond to a cocky womanizer, who escapes his abusive father in hardscrabble Buffalo, New York, to land, years later, in the Major Leagues, what ball players call: The Show.

"In seemingly-effortless fashion, Freligh has created a man who, as he succeeds in big-time sport, is painfully-aware of his many self-indulgent failings, balls that just miss the strike zone.

"Like us, Stepansky needs far more love than he can give. Like us, he finds himself staggering between the almost-meaningful and the absurd, sort of here, sort of gone.

"If you only read one poetry book a year – choose this one.” -- Thom Ward, Editor, BOA Editions


“If a healthy Keats had lived in Brooklyn, preferably during the Fifties, he would have written about baseball instead of Grecian urns and nightingales. We don’t have Keats, but we do have Sarah Freligh, who knows baseball, knows the talk, the poetry of the talk, and the game itself as a kind of poetry: swift, elegant articulations of motion, power, and speed.

No one writes this well about baseball purely from imagination, and Freligh’s experience as a sportswriter serves her well, though her poems are as far from mere reportage as Keats is from Grantland Rice. If you love either baseball or poetry, you’ll love Sort of Gone; if you love them both, you’ll be sending copies to friends.” -- B. H. Fairchild

A Review of Bonus Baby by Sarah Freligh (Polo Grounds Press, Cincinnati, 2002), published in Spitball in Fall 2003:

"Eleven of the sixteen poems in the collection have previously appeared in literary journals such as Aethlon, Elysian Fields Quarterly and The Journal of Sport Literature, which suggests something about the quality of the individual pieces. Gathered together, the effect extends beyond any one poem to form a suite that evokes in a musical rather than a narrative sense the life and career of a single player, Al, the bonus baby of the title poem.

"The first, eighth and final poems chart the course of a no-hitter and proved the basic frame for the intervening pieces. In the concluding lines of the last poem, the no-hitter complete, we read, “Nothing, Al says to the reporters crowding his locker. I wasn’t thinking of nothing out there.” The comment is doubly ironic.

"On the one hand many of the episodes that provide the substance of the other poems seem to be the images and memories that he was thinking of in those few hours of glory. On the other hand, the tawdriness, the bleakness, of most of those images and memories for a dark contrast with those few hours. What is nothing? The accumulation of bitter remembrances, wasted times, lost hopes, or the few shining moments?

"The poems between “No-hitter, Fifth Inning” and “No-hitter, Seventh Inning” give us a glimpse of Al’s youth up to the time he signs his first contract. The tone is set by “Lesson”: Al’s father gives him a baseball glove for Christmas:

Time you learned something,
his father says, finishing off
his first pint of the day

"So:

. . . Before dinner they play
catch in the street, shin-deep
in show. No coats. We ain’t girls,
his father says, though you throw like one,
walks back to where Al is, slaps
him across the face with his callused
hand says Son, that’s how the ball
should sound when it hits the glove.

"Particularly striking is “Star,” which describes Al standing in line in the high school gym waiting to get Mickey Mantle’s autograph. He’s stalled for a time in front of a trophy case that features photos of a twelve-letter high school athlete whose career had culminated by pitching the team to the city championship:

. . . Signed by the Dodgers
that year but went with Uncle Sam
instead, and there’s the Purple Heart he won
for dying on an island that wasn’t
on any map and here’s
Mickey Mantle
finally
smaller than Al imagined a hero should be.

"The second sequence leading up to No-hitter, Ninth Inning” gives sketches of life in and around professional baseball: “Minor League,” “Groupie,” “Spring Training,” “Milwaukee Airport, 4:55 a.m.” The daily routine (“Al lives with five other guys/ and orange shag carpeting. . . ” “The sun is up. / Another city.”) mocks the promise implied in bonus baby and in a few words, Freligh makes clear that the scout’s exultant “This kid can’t miss” has moved from hope to irony.

“ 'Al’s Loss' doubles the irony and recalls the concluding lines of 'Star.' Al is walking home after being hit hard in a losing effort [and] witnesses an author accident in which an elderly driver is killed. Al is the first to reach the dying man:

Harriet, is all the old man says, eyelids flickering,
dead of a heart attack, according to the paper the next day, Eighty-three
years summed up in an inch, while Al’s loss gets twenty-four, plus a picture.

"Another loss (or losses) evokes perhaps the finest poem in the collection, “Novena,” the fourteenth of the sequence. It is late on Saturday, Al is kneeling in a church, having lit three candles, one for his mother, another for his father, and

. . . a third asking
God to please give him
back his fastball, heal
his shoulder please, make
the ache go away, please
God damnit please. Asks
His forgiveness for asking.

"Then follow “Milwaukee Airport, 4:55 a.m.” and the completion of the no-hitter. “Nothing, Al says to the reporters crowding his locker. I wasn’t thinking of nothing out there.”

"The forms vary but there is a consistency in the language that binds the whole. It is ordinary language, completely appropriate to the substance of the poems and the approach, which is direct, not elliptical or metaphorical. It is most effective, and most poetic, in the lyrics of short terse lines and stanzas. Those which are more like prose poems are, well, more prosaic. The cover illustration by Troy Tennard is a striking prelude to this collection which for those who like baseball poetry—and if you’re reading this, you must—Bonus Baby is a good read."