Acknowledgements

‘The abuse we have taken, and the abuse we must be prepared to take for the entire winter, we richly deserve.’ – Boston Red Sox shortstop Rick Burleson, in 1978, upon once again losing to the New York Yankees.

Some of the poems (or versions of them) in this collection have previously appeared in Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetries, Cosmonaut Avenue, Dusie, Fjords, Hazlitt, The Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems, Jacket2, Language Matters: Interviews with 22 Quebec Poets, Lemon Hound, the Literary Review of Canada, Matrix, McSweeney’s, NewPoetry, OTP 2, Poetry is Dead, the Toronto Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, the Walrus, the Washington Square Journal and Window Fishing: The Night We Caught Beatlemania. ‘The History of Baseball’ served initially as text for visual art by Matthew Thompson, Aanchal Molhotra and the TANDEM art team at the Mouse Print Gallery in Montreal during April of 2013. I would like to thank the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Merci, merci millefois to the entire Coach House team, esp. my editor, Jeramy Dodds, and to the always amazing and insightful Alana Wilcox. Grateful acknowledgements to Elizabeth Bachinsky, Arjun Basu, Jeremy Breen, Jason Camlot, Steve Creep, Lynn Crosbie, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Deanna Fong, Sara Johnston, Scott Macdonald, Alessandro Porco, Bükem Reitmayer, Robin Richardson, Matthew Rosenberg.Jacob Spector, Mike Spry, Andrea Stevens and Sarah Steinberg. Special thanks to Dave Kaufman for my tenure as ‘the poet laureate of CJAD radio’ in Montreal and for giving me airtime to premiere many of these poems (or, at least, some of the funnier lines) on The Exchange. Love to everyone in my family, Johnny, Gail and Heather and all their families; to Janice and Mike keeping it real in Ville D’Anjou and, most of all, to Carol and ‘The Team.’ #ILoveNoodles

J’suis tellement fancy

Gatorade mojitos

Banni de Wendy’s

Les Promenades de St. Bruno