I rediscovered Susan Orlean’s writing and am currently curled up inside one of her sentences. I hope she doesn’t mind.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, I am going to write about a literary journalist. (That’s a poetry joke.)

Having earned her chops in the newspaper world (NOTE: Newspapers are big pieces of paper on which news used to be printed), Susan Orlean engaged this reader from the first sentence of this piece on an up-and-coming basketball player. Watch me as I misquote:

The white men in suits follow Felipe Lopez everywhere he goes.

The first sentence hooked me. Lopez was New York’s first Dominican high school basketball star. I don’t know if the white men in suits still follow him. I imagine not. I’m looking out my window and, thankfully, no one appears to be following me either.

Orlean chooses subjects who are semi-famous or have the potential to become famous. They aren’t so famous — Brad Pitt level famous — that we’re sick of them. They don’t need the article to turn them into human beings or to bring them down to Earth from the superstar level. These people are human, and Orlean shows us why we should be interested in their lives. The people she chooses to write about possess unique talents — bullfighting, high school basketball, real estate, handling Hollywood. In one of my favorite essays — about an agent run out of Hollywood — Orlean ends before the story ends. We don’t know exactly what happens. We’re left with mystery, which is a refreshing change in an age of reverse telephone lookup and Google taking satellite images of one’s decrepit garden.

These days, I suppose a Google search would take care of my curiosity about these subjects. Did the female bullfighter remain a superstar in Spain? What happened to Felipe Lopez? What is that Hollywood agent doing now? You know how it goes though. I have two skinned elbows from a playground slide accident. I’m going to stay off Google, let myself stay curious, and heal my elbows. Then, I’ll weed my garden in preparation for the next Google satellite photo of my house.