Shortly after Noah Davis enrolled in Indiana University’s MFA program, where I teach poetry, we discovered that we’re both pretty serious ballplayers. Noah had just finished his basketball career at Seton Hill University, and I had kept up a decent (if intermittent) basketball regimen. We began playing one-on-one together, and while warming up or shooting foul shots in between games, we would talk — about teaching, poetry, family, college sports, gardening. After a couple of months we thought it might be interesting to write letters back and forth. We could make an independent study of it, an exercise in epistolary essay writing. After the semester ended, we kept going, until now we have almost a book’s worth of these little missives. They are about basketball, and, as such, they are about gender and masculinity and race and capitalism and touch and care. And, as we’re both poets, they’re very much about language and the imagination. And, as we’re friends, they’re also about friendship.