Pleasures of the Game, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, is a book of deceptively playful poems, of sparkling surfaces that conceal dark undercurrents. Its subjects include games of all kinds: from Double Dutch to the chess match of love, from painters’ illusions to professional ice hockey, from the stratagems of spies to the life-and-death game we play against the universe.
[These poems] are exhilarated by their moment, engaged by the paradoxes … exuberant and activist … [a] charmed adventure in measure and meaning.
—Foreword by Eavan Boland
Austin Allen 