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You Are Here, You Are Not a Ghost
Mark Doty
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
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‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
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‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
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‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
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‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Mark Doty
Mark Doty is the author of eight poetry collections including, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008 and My Alexandria, which won the 1995 T. S. Eliot Prize. What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life will be published in April 2020. He lives in New York City.
Photograph © Rachel Eliza Griffiths