How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask: Poems

by E. Ethelbert Miller, Merrill Leffler (Introduction)

Overview

One can watch many baseball games before seeing a triple play. With this book E. Ethelbert Miller completes his baseball trilogy. How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask is a collection of poems that celebrates baseball by putting a spin on how the game brings meaning to one’s life.

Well known Washington, D.C. poet, former Howard University professor, and literary activist, Ethelbert Miller is personal and political when writing from the batter’s box or pitching mound. Here are poems that tip their caps to Joe DiMaggio, Ken Griffey Sr., and Emmett Ashford.

Miller's book does not duck from examining the Black Sox Scandal, the career of Glenn Burke or the tragedy of Carl Mays. Miller’s own life at times is a playing field for sadness and what

Ellington called “mood indigo.” But his love for baseball is a complete game and continues to reflect the hard heat of pleasure. After If God Invented Baseball and When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and other Baseball Stories, this book, like a triple play, is a thing of beauty.

“Baseball should create a new position, poet laureate, and give it to E. Ethelbert Miller. In his third collection of baseball poems (‘a double turning into a trilogy,’ as he writes), Miller weaves knuckleballs and pickoff throws with universal themes of family, race, relationships—and the issues of our time, like rioting and voting rights. With allusions to Monbouquette and Giacometti, Henderson and Danticat, How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask will make you laugh, think and feel a whole new way about baseball and the world around it.”—Tyler Kepner, national baseball columnist for the New York Times and author of the best-selling K: A History of Baseball In Ten Pitches

"Ethelbert Miller is one of the most significant and influential poets of our time." —Gwendolyn Brooks

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947951587
Publisher:	City Point Press
Publication date:	09/13/2022
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	505,694
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller is Associate Editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Miller’s latest book is How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask, published by City Point Press.

Merrill Leffler is a poet, an editor, a science writer, and a former physicist and engineer. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, and High Point, North Carolina, he earned a BS at North Carolina State University and worked at NASA. He did graduate work in literature at University College Maryland and Oxford University.

He is the author of three books of poetry: Mark the Music (2012), Take Hold (1997), and Partly Pandemonium, Partly Love (1984). He cofounded and edited the literary magazine Dryad, which evolved into an independent press of the same name. He is also a cofounder of the DC-area literary nonprofit The Writer’s Center.

Since 2011, Leffler has been poet laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland, where he lives with his wife, the poet Ann Slayton.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction Merrill Leffler xiii

Mood Indigo 3

Every Buddhist Is a Baseball Player 4

Trade Deadline at the Museum 6

Oranges 7

Baseball Cards 8

Sophisticated Lady 9

Sun Ra Left Me Here Standing in Front of the Sam Gilliam 10

Box Score Sonnet 11

The Sounds of the Game 12

Yoga 13

Radio 14

Wild Pitch 15

Waikin' 16

How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask 17

Losing the Lead and One's Children 18

The Black Sox Scandal 19

Chicago 20

Looking for Sidney Bechet 21

Emmett Ashford 22

Poem for Glenn Burke 23

Carl Mays 24

Jimmy Piersall 25

Ken Griffey Sr. 26

Poem for Stacey Abrams 27

Joe DiMaggio 28

It's Either Baseball or Free Jazz 29

Walking Man 30

Trapped Inside the Glove: The American Pitch 31

Baseball Meditation 32

Inside the Park 33

The Changeup 34

Scouting Report 35

Haiti 36

Runners 37

Pine Tar 38

Beanball #2 39

Death of a Ball Player in 9 Innings 40

The Game 43

The Daily News 44

Beer 45

The Haiku Fan 46

The Losing Streak 47

The Slump 48

The Standings 49

The Walk Off 50

The Shooting 51

Just Be Young for Me 52

I Feel 53

Her 54

Hospice 55

A League of Their Own 56

The Things We Leave Behind 57

Querido Clemente 58