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A Poet Who Loves Tennis Follows the Grand Tour, in Prose

Roger Federer at Wimbledon. Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

THE CIRCUIT
A Tennis Odyssey
By Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Illustrated. 216 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

In an interview in The Paris Review, the writer Luc Sante said: “I often think of what I do as wide poems. … I write prose with a poet’s head.” This is an apt description of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s book on the 2017 A.T.P. men’s tennis tour, “The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey,” which recounts the year in the men’s game from the Australian Open in January through the tour finals in London in November.