“In poetry and handball both, it’s all about the change of pace. Settle your reader into a rhythm then shift the tempo. Slow down the game then break away. Disruption makes visible the presence of fluent continuity — it’s an end in itself, punctuation; about-face, the line-break by which the game changes from pumped blood to calm conscience. On the sidelines, the Icelandic fans chantÍsland, Ísland, Ísland. Unlike at a football match, or a baseball game, the fans create the rhythm, as much a part of the game’s sequence as the players themselves, the way the listening reader’s experience of the poem is through the sonic as much as the sense.” 

-Lytton Smith

Read more about the poetry of handball at the Los Angeles Review of Books