Home Court
by Ben Alfaro and José Olivarez

This jam-packed dynamic-duo debut collection explores what it means to grow up loving basketball, playing it, watching it, thinking about it -- and how the relationship between men and games/sports informs masculine identity in American culture.  Whether it's watching ballers from different races square off for dominance of the court or the imperative of playing through the pain of a jammed finger, Ben and José go deep into how they grew into the men they've become and how they feel about evolutions still in the future.

“These brilliant poems pivot and gasp through the wreckage and splendor of what it means to be a man with humility and joy, grief and nostalgia, precision and compassion. I dare you to read this book and not be moved.  What Alfaro and Olivarez have done is stitched together a road map for guys like us to find our way back to the beautiful men we were always made to become.”
- Carlos Andrés Gómez, Author of “Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood”
 BENJAMIN ALFARO is a Detroit-based writer and teaching artist originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the co-author of the collaborative poetry collection, Home Court (Red Beard Press, 2014) and his writing has appeared most recently in Cognitive Liberation Magazine, Mangrove Review, Stymie Magazine, Acentos Review, Red Cedar Review, and elsewhere. He was a featured artist on the HBO Original Series Brave New Voices and on Michigan public radio. He is the co-founder of Louder Than a Bomb Youth Poetry Festival’s Michigan chapter and WayneSLAM, a collegiate troupe of performance artists and organizers at Wayne State University. He is a Writer-in-Residence and Youth Leadership Coordinator with InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit, serving area high schools and community centers

JOSÉ OLIVAREZ is a poet from Calumet City, Illinois. He is a graduate of Harvard University and a founding member of the Teaching Artist Corps at Young Chicago Authors. He has performed and taught at high schools, universities, and book festivals across the country, and his work has been published in The Acentos Review, Specter Magazine, Side B Magazine, The Harvard Voice, among others. It has also been featured on Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie blog, Chicago Public Radio, and on Mass Poetry’s PoeTry on the T program. His first book, Home Court, is available now at http://homecourtpoems.tumblr.com/purchase

(Bio Credit to Union Station Magazine, see more at: http://www.unionstationmag.com/2014/12/poem-ben-alfaro/ or http://www.unionstationmag.com/2014/07/poems-jose-olivarez/)
“To read Home Court is to hear the tired layers of textbook masculinity peeled away stanza by hard-fought stanza. Here are two men who love hard as handshakes after blows: basketball, hip hop, city life, sound, and—I’ll be damned—one another. Alfaro and Olivarez remind us that trauma & tenderness share the same bruise. A coming of age collection not for the empty shirts among us.  Nothing but skin here.“
- Marcus F. Wicker, Author of “Maybe the Saddest Thing”

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