Playing in Time, a collection of essays from the street

It's not great literature, but Playing in Time is an unvarnished collection of stories about regular folk in irregular circumstances.

Playing in Time
Carlo Rotella
University of Chicago Press

You wouldn't call Carlo Rotella's straightforward and unadorned writing poetic, but it's fair to call Rotella a poet of urban life, alive to the freedom that cities offer us to pursue lives of our own devising, and of masculinity and the ways men lose and find themselves in their passions.

This new collection of essays and shorter pieces doesn't always hit the mark, when brevity and age combine to make a piece's transience all too apparent. But given space, Rotella really engages.

He knows boxing, and can illuminate the forces that drive men to the ring and what happens to the champions and the nearly men after the fighting stops.

There's a particularly fascinating essay on a carnivalesque match between Eric 'Butterbean' Esch, a wrestler who wants the respect real boxers get, and the technically brilliant former world heavyweight champion Larry Holmes. From this unpromising encounter - an old guy fighting a fat guy, as he puts it - Rotella conjures a whole world of ambition, frustration and self-delusion.