This is Tim Peeler's second book of poems from baseball. Starting with time-honoured themes - fathers and sons, baseball and time, memory and the nation and team and player and loyalty - he adapts the universal to the local and personal, showing baseball is a powerful tool for mining our history.

The players of the independent Carolina League were outlaws. A diverse lot that included preachers and ex-cons, with many former and future Major Leaguers, they played ball during the desperate years of the Great Depression, when half of organized professional baseball's minor leagues went broke and ceased operations. Despite the number of defaulting leagues and teams, the players were held to their prior contracts, and many found themselves unemployed, unable to play without violating the reserve clause that bound them to their previous club. The threat of being blackballed by organized...

Set on what remains of a small family farm in the Blue Ridge foothills of Western North Carolina, ROUGH BEAST depicts the quirky ascension of Larry Ledbetter from small-time country gangster to unwilling literary lion. Larry's voice is the engine that drives the sometimes comic but often violent narrative. In his attempt to come to grips with both personal tragedies and his inexplicable success, Larry reveals his vulnerability and shared humanity.

Knuckle Bear is both enlivened and burdened by a fractured language, inherited from the settlers who first came to the North Carolina mountains from the hills and valleys of Scotland and Ulster to claim this wild land. It is a language that is broken and crippled, violent and near violent, innocent and depraved, and loving and brutal as these characters. As author of The Iguana Tree, Michel Stone notes, "If Tim Peeler were a novelist he'd have written Deliverance, only even somehow more Deliverance than the Deliverance Dickey wrote. I couldn't stop reading. Like when you pass a horrific train...