Poetry. To hold on to what is in motion, or to persist at being in motion (not inert!): these are the twin goals of Ball's poems. HOLD SWAY reckons with the presence of menace or threat in daily life, even in moments when all seems well enough, or when things look beautiful. Climate anxiety, numbing corporate manipulations of our attention, crimes on both a personal and a grand scale (like being someone's knife-point hostage, or filming the police after they have killed a suspect, or the Paris attacks, or the pollution of the oceans...): all are tangled up with how to live one's American life (raising children, losing a marriage, watching tv--) as Ball seeks "a footing in hope, ... a stay."
