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.
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.