In baseball, as in much poetry, beauty comes from tension. Groundrules and boundaries confine those who would play, but the best find ways to exploit their strictures, and just as the daring base runner takes second on a fly to right, the practiced poet trips the sleepy reader with a surprise rhyme, bold line break, or a jarring reversal of foot. It's no surprise, then, that hardball has a larger body of literature than other sports, or that aficionados are more likely than others to quote lines of verse in support of the game they love. This is Tim Peeler's second book of poems from baseball. It contains some of his most moving and best-crafted poetry. Starting with time-honored themes--fathers and sons, baseball and time, memory and the nation, team and player and loyalty--the poet adapts the universal to the local and personal, proving that baseball, with its easy accommodation of reflection, remains a powerful tool for mining our individual and collective history.

This guidebook is the first of three regional volumes that invite residents and out-of-state visitors to explore North Carolina while reading literature from our state's finest writers. Organized geographically through a series of eighteen half-day and day-long tours in the western part of the state, the book directs curious travelers to the historic sites where Tar Heel authors have lived and worked. Along the way, travelers can read outstanding excerpts from the writers, evoking the places, customs, colloquialisms, and characters that figure prominently in their poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and plays. More than 170 writers from the past and present are featured in this volume, including Sequoyah, Elizabeth Spencer, Fred Chappell, Charles Frazier, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Robert Morgan, William Bartram, Gail Godwin, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Lillian Jackson Braun, Nina Simone, and Romulus Linney. Each tour provides information about the libraries, museums, colleges, bookstores, and other venues open to the public where writers regularly present their work or are represented in exhibits, events, performances, and festivals.

This study analyzes contemporary American sports poetry, demonstrating that poems about sports express common attitudes and showing what the respective sports' poems say about American culture of the last fifty years. While placing particular emphasis on the hero in American sports poetry, the study proves that a considerable body of sports poetry exists in American culture and that it is worthy of serious analysis. The study opens with the analysis done so far on sports poetry, articulates methods of approach, and gives a brief history of sports poetry, beginning with victory chants around the tribal campfire. From Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" to Gibb's "Listening to the Ballgame," the body of the work is organized thematically by sport: baseball, football, basketball, women's sports, and minor sports such as golf, racquet sports, and boxing. The study concludes with a chapter on poems about fans and spectators and a summary of the study's arguments. Each section gives detailed readings of many poems.

The fifty-eight year Easter Monday baseball rivalry between North Carolina State University and Wake Forest University had a traditional fraternity celebration known as the PIKA Ball, held on the N.C. State campus, that followed it on Monday evening. Told from the viewpoint of sports journalists, players, fans, and PIKA members, the narrative reveals the excitement and developing strategies as the contest traverses several baseball eras. At the height of its popularity, the game drew astonishingly large crowds of spectators, many of whom were absentee government workers, providing the impetus for the North Carolina State Legislature to declare Easter Monday to be a state holiday.