The 5th Inning

(Paperback)

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Description

This memoir finds Miller returning to baseball, the game of his youth, in order to find the metaphor that will provide the measurement of his life. Almost 60, he ponders whether his life can now be entered into the official record books as a success or failure. One man's examination of personal relationships, depression, love and loss. This is a story of the individual alone on the pitching mound or in the batter's box. It's a box score filled with remembrance. It's a combination of baseball and the blues. A memoir from a literary activist.

Reviews

"Traditionally, it's viewed as a female occupation, to strip away the layers and examine the experience of relationships with a partner, with children, within one's own interior emotional life. Here comes a strong, real male voice, exploring the terrifying territory of growing older--in a marriage, in a family, in one's body. Ethelbert Miller writes with naked honesty and courage about what it is to be a man no longer young. Youth may have left him. Passion has not."
--Joyce Maynard, author of At Home in the World

"The 5th Inning is a poetic meditation as much as a memoir. Ethelbert brings his poet's eye to the game of baseball and transforms it into a metaphor for a life that knows strikes, groundouts, and errors as well as the beauty of a ball sailing straight across homeplate."
--Josephine Reed, WPFW

"Ethelbert Miller brings an accomplished poet's stunning language to this important memoir, and no one writes more eloquently about the lives--the triumphs and dilemmas--of black American men than he does."
--Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, on Fathering Words

Author Bio

E. Ethelbert Miller is the editor of Poet Lore magazine, the board chair of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a board member of the Writer's Center. He is the author of Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer and How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love, which was an Independent Publisher Award Finalist. He is the recipient of the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, the Barnes & Noble/Writers for Writers Award, and a Fulbright grant to visit Israel. In March 2016, the AWP awarded him the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. He lives in Washington, DC.