Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion is a collection of found poems composed of the words of professional athletes. The content of post-game interviews and sports chatter is so often meaningless, if not insufferable, and yet there are athletes like Metta World Peace who transcend lame clichés and rote patter, who use language in surprising ways, who can be funny and shocking and insightful and alarmingly sincere — pure poetry. Muhammad Ali offered dazzling displays of lexical wizardry, and Allen Iverson’s infamous “practice” rant shifted the post-game press conference from the banal to the absurd. This book is a celebration of these rare and exceptional moments. Various poetic forms and line-breaks highlight — or, in the words of Deion Sanders, “deem to set a candor on” — the sophisticated, sublime, and surprising performances of language made by professional athletes.

The death of high school basketball star Rob Washington in an automobile accident affects the lives of his close friend Andy, who was driving the car, and many others in the school.

Catullus, who lived from about 84 to 54 BC, was one of ancient Rome's most gifted, versatile and passionate poets. Living at a time of radical social change at the end of the Roman Republic, he belonged to a group of young poets who embraced Hellenistic forms to forge a new literary style, the so-called 'neoterics'. This comprehensive edition includes the complete, unabridged and unbowdlerised poems and is the definitive student edition of Catullus' work. The extensive introduction covers topics including the role of Catullus' literary paramour Lesbia, the few biographical certainties known about Catullus' life and other figures from the contemporary political scene. In addition to this, there is a brief overview of the poems' textual history, discussion of Catullus' style across the collection and linguistic discussions of morphology, vocabulary, syntax and metre. The commentary notes include individual introductions and bibliographies to each poem, as well as line by line notes which translate difficult phrases and gloss obscure words. In addition to this, more detailed explanations of poetic, structural and contextual points are also provided.