AIRBALL

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Molly Ledbetter’s debut, Air Ball, is a tragicomedy of poetry and prose. Channeling comedians like Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Jack Handey, Ledbetter conjures through their humor— and her own—the sadness that can underpin comedy, reminding us how both are scaffolds for our collective experience. Staring this down with a gaze that doesn’t flinch so much as deflect, Air Ball is as sincere as it is discerning. The poems are switch-hitters, riding the edge between sentimentality and cynicism. Here is a fresh voice deadpanning an experience of privilege and otherness, inviting the reader to laugh lest they cry. Molly Ledbetter received an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers University. She is the author of the chapbook, Flounder (After Hours Editions). In 2024, she was a finalist for the Copper Nickel / Milkweed Editions Jake Adam York Prize, a semifinalist for Fonograf Editions Open Genre Book Prize, and a semifinalist for the 2024 Airlie Prize. Her work has appeared in Annulet, Changes Review, blush lit, and elsewhere. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Air Ball is her first book. “Air Ball is deceptively easy to read, like a joke that goes by so quickly you ask yourself later if there wasn’t something life-or-death important hiding in there. It feels written from the silence that falls once the crowd is done laughing, when the blurry little questions we’d like to eternally avoid sneak back into the room. The voice of this book, which is calm, tinged with mysticism, and as dead serious as it is funny, thinks through art, ‘art,’ celebrity, what we lose when we lose, but maybe also what we gain when we lose. There is something exhilarating, after all, about throwing up an air ball, about telling a joke that bombs, about missing our target entirely, egregiously, unbelievably. Air Ball reminds me of that BeeGees song I love, when one of the miraculous Gibbs hits us with a sort of koan: I started a joke that started the whole world crying. And later, like a kind of sideways redemption, I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing.” —Courtney Bush, author of The Lamb with the Talking Scroll Show more