Justin Carter’s ‘Laterals’: the poetry of sport

Evocative meditations on life viewed through the lens of athletics: futility, desperation, heartbreak, and–most importantly–hope

In football, the lateral pass is one of the great acts of desperation. It ranks up there with the Hail Mary pass, baseball’s suicide squeeze, and pulling the goalie in hockey. Losing teams attempt these plays as a last resort. Most often they fail, but they offer fleeting moments of suspense and hope, and they keep fans on the edge of their seats and viewers glued to the TV.

And on those rare occasions when these acts of desperation work, they can be poetry.

Frustration, futility, desperation, heartbreak, and hope populate the sports-themed and sports-adjacent poems in Justin Carter‘s latest collection, Laterals. Published by .406 Press, Laterals arrives September 9, which coincides with opening day of the 2026-27 National Football League season. You can pre-order the book now.

Carter landed on Laterals as the book’s title “because I think it contains so much good and bad at the same time,” he explained in an email to me.

“So often, we think of laterals in football as a kind of exercise in futility—the kick return team tossing the ball around in hopes of creating something out of nothing at the last minute, but most of the time, it fails,” he explained. “Still, when it does work, it’s this thing of real beauty. I love how the title & the poems capture this quality—to be stuck, but to believe you aren’t stuck &, sometimes, to be right about that.”

As a fan of many professional and collegiate sports, I’m naturally drawn to the subject matter of this book, and I wish sports, being such an integral part of our culture, were the focus of more poetry. (More about that below.)

But even if I weren’t as interested in the topic, I’m pretty sure I still would enjoy this volume. Carter takes a playful and witty perspective of the topics, even when he was writing about the most futile of situations. And although Carter grew up in the Houston area and follows/followed many of that city’s current and former sports franchises, I, a longtime St. Louis Cardinals fan who remembers those NL Central rivalries with the Houston Astros in the late 1990s and early 2000s, have tried to set aside my bias to offer an impartial perspective on Laterals.

Justin Carter

Steeped in sports

Sports touches many aspects of Carter’s life. Readers of this site (he was featured in a Friday Five here last spring) may know him mainly as the editor of the literary journal Some Words or from his substantial body of prose and poetry, including his first collection of poems, Brazos. But Carter also writes professionally about women’s basketball, auto racing, the National Football League, and other sports endeavors.

Topics of Laterals‘ poems include Houston teams like the Rockets (NBA); the former WNBA powerhouse Comets, which folded in 2008; and the NFL’s Houston Oilers (now the Tennessee Titans) and their legendary coach, Bum Phillips, as well as local hero Nolan Ryan, Major League Baseball’s all-time strikeout leader. Now living and working in Des Moines, Carter arrived in Iowa in time to witness the Caitlin Clark era of women’s basketball at the University of Iowa and all the craziness that ensued.

The trick about writing about specific teams or sports or eras in sports history is that the subject matter can sometimes come across as an inside joke–insider baseball, if you will, to those unfamiliar with the some of the teams or moments. But with each poem, Carter deftly connects his free verse and prose poetry, even when they’re about highly specific things, to the universal.

Take, for instance, “I Wish I Remembered the O.J. Chase.” With this poem, Carter turns one of our culture’s “where were you when…” moments into a free-association piece connecting his infant son’s need to pee and a piece of fan clothing–his Houston Rockets Hakeem Olajuwon shirsey–to the famous slow-motion chase he doesn’t remember, even as he connects it to a more important cultural touchstone for him and fellow Houston Rockets fans. As he writes, “…maybe it’s fine if sometimes/we can’t find a way to make a thought grand—/maybe it’s fine for observations/to be just observations…”

Another piece that taps into universal truths through the lens of sports is “Poem For Which The Houston Comets Are A Metaphor For Grief,” a contemplation on how “we cease to exist in ways/that only vaguely resemble how/we spent our best years.” Ah, sweet futility.

These are just two of the sixty-something poems in Laterals that view life through the lens of sports and sports-adjacent topics. They include the Madden NFL video game, the COVID-19 pandemic, Monster Jams, the Pop-Tarts Bowl, Twitter, open tabs in a web browser, and playing pickup basketball at dawn after being turned away from a New York Dolls concert, among others. With Carter’s permission, I’ve posted a few of my favorite poems below.

Many of the pieces deal with the heaviness of life–the grief, the mourning, the futility of life as viewed through the lens of sports. The one about American stock car legend Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s first race after the death of his father, Dale Sr. is especially heartrending (“…It was/the first time you’d been there/since your father died/& I can’t even drive past the hospice/where my grandmother took/her final breath without/feeling broken…”). But the volume includes its share of hopeful moments, even a poem called “Loss” (“a player only gets a hit/40% of the time & yet we still/call it greatness”).

A distinctive position in the world of poetry

Apart from being an excellent collection, Laterals holds a distinctive position in the world of poetry. Think about it. How many poems about sports can you name, off the top of your head? For me, it’s a grand total of two: that famously depressing baseball poem, “Casey at the Bat,” and the paean to a boxing legend, “The Ballad of Muhammad Ali,” which I learned about only after its lines “He floats like a butterfly/He stings like a bee” were incorporated into a reggae-style radio hit (video) that was popular in my junior high days.

Let’s hope Laterals is the buzzer beater, the trick play, the Hail Mary pass that defies all odds and opens the gates to more sports-themed poetry in the future.

After all, as every sports fan knows, there’s always hope, right?

Excerpts from Laterals

Everyone In Des Moines Wants To Talk About Caitlin Clark

& they don’t want to talk about the dissonance

of loving women’s sports at a time

when the governor is pushing the whole state

to the right, an acceleration

toward limiting so many things. This guy

walks up to me in a bar & asks if I

can tell him something he doesn’t know

about Caitlin Clark. I could have said

anything. I could have told him

that birds shoot from her hands when she releases

the logo three. Could have said

she knocked one in off the jumbotron.

Everything’s believable if you have

the right subject matter. My in-laws

complain that the game is on ESPN tonight

& they don’t have ESPN. We could fix that—

I could log them in so they could watch

what might be her collegiate swan song,

but I’m not sure they want that,

to potentially witness her end. No one

does. On Twitter, the sports business guy

makes another uninformed post about NIL

like that might change something,

a different decision. His words

fork no lightning. Tell me, the man says again because I have stood

there & said nothing.

(Originally published in ONE ART)

***

My Parents’ Divorce As The Rockets Miss 27 Consecutive Threes

When James Harden lifts for that first shot,

his body flailing as he releases,

everything is still okay—

we don’t know yet how many times

the ball will go nowhere,

or how there aren’t many months

of togetherness left. The lead’s twelve

at that point. It’s eleven

when Harden’s next attempt’s blocked,

the same score Eric Gordon misses

after that. By the fourth one,

the Rockets have actually managed

to widen the margin. Sometimes,

you get a little bit of hope—

not everything falls apart

in a linear fashion, like when I’m back

from college & my father

sleeps over. Still, it all unravels,

Harden begging for foul calls

that never arrive. I’m not sure what point

you realize how many times the ball’s gone

astray. I’m sure, watching it live,

I didn’t realize how bad it’d all gotten

until it was too late—even with the rock

clanging off, it takes until the third quarter

for Houston to lose the lead, for the game to finally slip away.

***

Some Tabs I Have Open Right Now

The Iowa State soccer schedule, because there were a lot of men in Iowa State apparel at the airport on the way to Houston—turns out, it was the rugby team, which we learned as we offboarded. The Wikipedia page for the Great Depression. The Wikipedia page for Tompall Glaser. A map of some bar in Nashville—I don’t remember why. The webcomic I’ve read for nearly two decades. A page about the WGA strike. The Idaho Vandals 2022 football schedule. The Google results for Loreen Eurovision. The McDonalds menu. The Google results for how many diapers does a newborn need. Ebay results for Steve & Barry’s jackets. The auction site where we had to bid on my wife’s grandmother’s things. The schedule for a cover band in Texas—this is there twice, months apart. Three different order screens for the bagel place down the street. The cocktail menu for a bar that recently shut down. The Google results for average novel length. The Wikipedia page for BoJack Horseman. A poem by Jane Mead.

Friday Five: short story writer Charlie Kondek

‘… in advertising I was a strategist, and I think I bring a strategist’s approach to writing.’

There’s a certain type of fiction writer who comes to the craft from the world of public relations and marketing, and brings that perspective and expertise to their work. A knack for straightforward storytelling mixed with a bit of salesmanship. Charlie Kondek is one of those people.

Charlie Kondek in his man cave, enjoying a libation and the liner notes of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown album.
Continue reading “Friday Five: short story writer Charlie Kondek”

New poem: ‘Our Crisis of Confidence’

How a literary magazine editor’s challenge prompted me to write this poem about my 19-year-old life

Once in a while, I encounter something online that ignites a spark of creativity.

That’s what happened in June, when Justin Carter, a writer and editor of the literary-magazine-that-looks-like-a-message-board Some Words, posted a challenge to writers on Twitter/X. Some of us were busy posting images of ourselves when we were 19. Many of us were working diligently at avoiding our writing by posting pics when Justin suggested we should instead “be writing poems about themselves at 19 & sending those poems to some words.”

Challenge accepted.

I spent that afternoon writing “Our Crisis of Confidence,” an impressionistic piece about my 19th year on this planet (November 1979-November 1980). It was a tumultuous time of high gas prices, stagflation, crisis with Iran, and a president that seemed to be fumbling everything he touched. Sound familiar? Plus ça change, as they say.

Here’s a peek at the intro:

OUR CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

We found ourselves at Jack’s house
most Friday nights. Saturdays, too.
We’d hand over a buck or two, if
we had it to spare, to help cover
the cost of beer. Jack was of age
and always had a keg on tap
in his extra fridge on the back porch,
stacks of red Solo cups on the adjacent card table.
Sometimes the beer was flat.
We didn’t care. We came
to escape our mundane fast-food jobs,
our junior-college lives, our worries
about the uncertain future. We wanted
The Cars on Jack’s stereo, letting us know
it was okay to let the good times roll, oh-oh.

***

My thanks to Justin for posting this challenge back in June, and for accepting this piece for publication.

Friday Five: more rage against the AI machine

Or, long live the em dash and rule of three!

The news regarding artificial intelligence’s intrusion into the world of writing, editing, and publishing is not, dear reader, heartening. Since my May 20 post about AI’s intrusion into the world of writers and writing (“Crossing the AI Rubicon,” about allegations a short story created by a large learning model, or LLM, won a prestigious literary prize), much more has transpired, and it all confirms that we are now in new territory. The AI ick is unavoidable. It’s seeping under our doors and through the cracks of our windowsills like some alien life form in a 1960s horror movie. Or like sewage spewing from a backed up septic system. It ain’t pretty. And it shows no sign of abatement.

Among many recent AI-related stories that make me cringe, if not rage:

1. The AI-pocalypse is here

So proclaims Becky L. Tuch in her recent Lit Mag News piece, “Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?“

“Sad truth: AI-generated writing is everywhere now,” she begins. “It’s in articles on prominent news sites, it’s in YouTube videos, it’s in the comments sections on articles and it’s in many articles here on Substack …”

AI is so prevalent, even Becky, ever vigilant at sniffing out AI-generated or -influenced writing, she fesses up to linking to “at least two articles” in a recent newsletter that she “suspected were at least partly generated with AI. Yet I linked to the pieces anyway. I know, I know. Yet in spite of my many misgivings, the content was relevant. And, for the love of all that is holy, such articles are frankly harder and harder to avoid.”

Becky loathes “the sound of AI-generated text”–as do I and most writers I know. She continues to share why:

It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.

AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.

Perhaps this proficiency is why so many are leaning into using AI for writing.

As for the question of her headline–“How do we even deal?”–she offers a quiz, not unlike those that used to populate glossy “women’s” magazines of old like Cosmopolitan or the more common, checkout-line publications like Women’s World. Give the entire post a read.

    2. Apparently, some horror writers ain’t skeered of AI

    That’s the conclusion I draw from a recent blog post from writer Keith Roysdon.

    The horror, the horror: Horror Writers Association column says AI is good and inevitable in an incredible self-own

    Keith outlines the issues related to this column’s pro-AI stance and, in an important aside, spells out why promoting AI is, essentially, evil.

    AI kills careers and it kills people. It takes work and money away from writers and editors and artists and musicians AND DOES ALL OF THEIR WORK IN A WORSE MANNER and the data centers that power AI are killing the planet, using up mammoth amounts of water to cool their technology, befouling the environment with hundreds of diesel engines that power data centers, committing sound pollution in poor neighborhoods – and they’re often in poor neighborhoods, isn’t that a surprise? – and generally making life worse for everyone except the people who own the AI companies and data centers.

    I hope you’ll take the time to give Keith’s post a read.

    3. ‘It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse.’

    Dealing with the specter of AI as a writer is horrible enough. We can continue to write to our heart’s content without ever consulting ChatGPT or any other LLM, and can be at peace knowing that, despite our use of em dashes or any other so-called “tells” of AI usage, our writing is 100 percent human. But teachers–particularly teachers of English or other writing-intensive disciplines–must deal with AI’s pervasiveness in the student body they are charged with teaching.

    “Where I once in-formed young minds, I now work to undo the de-formed,” writes Barbara Castle, who teaches English at Arkansas State University, in her marvelous essay “I Prefer Not To: Literary Laments in the Age of AI Dead Letters.”

    The falsely self-assured plagiarist who claims the inhuman derived prose is their own “instead of the cross, the Albatross / about [their] neck is hung.” A weight they are beginning to consider, as Jeff Sharlet points out in this article in The Chronicles of Higher Education. The visible burden of an inflated GPA they did not earn is causing “corroded mental health,” cynicism, and “some are filled with guilt.” I too, pay a similar price in a current system where credentials risk losing their meaning. Simulated competence “yaws and founders” toward shipwreck. Employers cry fraud. Students cry fraud. Instructors cry fraud. And universities cry “fraud” too, though the confusion may be one they helped create.

    She adds: “Passing grades for those who did not do the work is a moral injury to both student and teacher. Ethical dissonance over time wears the psyche down. The injustice of the C student, who does their own work, and the A student that does not, will the piper pay. The spuriously gained fake scholarship will cost us all—one day. Dostoevsky understood this. The crime may remain invisible. The punishment will not.”

    The Faustian bargain of using AI to cheat for a good grade will unfortunately stick with us. And maybe it will creep into other, non-academic aspects of our reading and writing lives (see item 4, below).

    4. Maybe students could use AI to help understand books, like this journalist at Axios

    By now we’ve heard about students no longer being required to read whole books for classes. Reading books is just so dang hard and time consuming! Maybe the answer is to have an AI tool to help readers make sense of those big ol’ novels, especially in this era of diminished attention spans. That’s what Nicholas Johnston, the publisher of a punchy, to-the-point newsletter called Axios, is doing. In his article “Robot book club,” he writes:

    AI has become my reading buddy as I’ve plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.

    “The way many of us actually read books — a few pages before bed, a chapter at the beach, another on a plane — makes it easy to lose the thread,” he writes. “AI can help you pick it back up without starting over.”

    To help him plow through James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which was “far too dense for casual vacation reading,” he prompted his AI assistant to be his “guide” to “help me understand what I’ve read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress.” The robot acknowledged the difficulty with Cooper’s prose–his “sentences are long and his diction is archaic”–and promised to give Johnston “a recap of what’s happened so far and clarify anything confusing. … I’ll stick strictly to what you’ve read. No hints about what’s coming.”

    Well, at least he’s trying to read. That counts for something, doesn’t it?

    Some on literary Twitter don’t much care for Johnston’s approach (which, by the way, is consistent with Axios‘ strong pro-AI stance in journalism and communications).

    As someone who was required to read eleven novels for one college course–who knew that a course called The American Novel would require so much reading?!–I wonder if I would have taken advantage of an AI assistant the way Johnston is, and would have contributed to my own cognitive decline, the way Katherine Argent (aka @effthealgorithm) suggests Johnston is doing? Maybe if he picked something a bit lighter for his vacation read, he wouldn’t feel the need to rely on AI.

    5. Speaking of ‘eff the algorithm’… eff the AI!

    The last words of this Friday Five go to Ann Handley, an insightful and entertaining writer who’s focused mainly on the business of marketing writing. The following comes from the latest version of her fortnightly newsletter, Total Annarchy, which anyone who writes anything should subscribe to, in my opinion. Her latest newsletter is titled “AI slop, accusations, and a better way,” and it’s just such a damn good article that I’m quoting from it extensively.

    AI learned all it knows from hoovering up what we all have written for generations, in books both good and bad, in both beautiful prose and the clunky text riddled with cliches and crutches. AI sucked it all up without discernment, because AI cannot discern. It mashed The Odyssey with How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety with a Reddit post about fixing your dishwasher and then let it gurgle in its gut a bit before it burped it back out as “models” we can use to “write.”

    Except it’s not “writing.” It’s just data. That’s not pejorative. It just is.

    And by the way, “hoovering” is actually a nice way of describing what actually happened. The process itself was at times violent. Anthropic spent millions of dollars buying physical books in bulk, then used industrial hydraulic cutting machines to slice off the bindings and spines, fed the loose pages into high-speed scanners, converted the images into machine-readable text files, and then threw the paper remains straight into the garbage. Some of those books stripped for parts were reportedly rare.

    If that’s not a metaphor for what’s actually going on with writing today, I don’t know what is.

    Not all hope is lost, however. Since AI is learning from human slop, we can–and should–do the hard work of writing well.

    “Most of us should spend less energy trying to detect AI or not,” she writes. “Develop the judgment to know what not to hand over to the robots.”

    Choose when not to take the shortcut. Protect the parts of yourself that deserve more of you. The parts where the struggle helps you…

    • Think more clearly
    • Develop taste
    • Make something distinctive
    • Feel deep joy, or
    • Grow

    That’s the resistance. It’s the only way through.

    That… and for pete’s sake use em dashes. They are blameless.

    Good points. And don’t surrender the rule of three, either.

    Image via Pexels.

    Friday Five (minus one): on creating well-rounded characters

    Expounding on advice from Sue Monk Kidd’s craft book/memoir ‘Writing Creativity and Soul’

    Welcome to 80 percent of a Friday Five. Today’s featured listicle contains only four points, but they are loaded with great information for writers who want to up their game.

    Today’s post attempts to expound on some pointers about character development from Sue Monk Kidd‘s 2025 craft book/memoir Writing Creativity and Soul.

    Image of Sue Monk Kidd's book 'Writing Creativity and Soul'

    If you aren’t familiar with Kidd, she’s the author of the novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings and a bunch of other works of fiction and nonfiction. In Writing Creativity and Soul, she draws from her own experience as well as from other writers–Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou among them–to provide some practical and inspiring guidance for writers.

    One section of the book that stuck with me was the chapter “About Characters: Four Questions.” Kidd’s advice here is prompting me to think more deeply about the characters that populate my writing, especially the main characters and their nemeses. While Kidd’s focus is on novel writing, I find that the questions she raises can help short story writers flesh out their characters.

    Continue reading “Friday Five (minus one): on creating well-rounded characters”