Source: GBF
Paperback, 96 pgs.
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When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories by E. Ethelbert Miller is a collection that spans not only the love of baseball, but also wider themes of racism, gender issues, and loss. The collection opens with “Hit This” in which a ball curves after falling off a table. What a metaphor for life and baseball! Isn’t that just the way of things, we assume life is headed in one direction and then it takes a turn.

From "Roberto" (pg. 6)

We had gloves. Cheap gloves. Gloves
with no pockets no matter how much
we kept punching into the center of them.

The gloves had missing pockets
like our missing fathers who punched
our mothers and swung bats at our heads.

Our fathers were gone and we outgrew their
absence. Our hands became too large
for small gloves. Many were lost or stolen.

Miller’s plain language and emphasis on the childhood games of baseball in the streets and parks become larger metaphors for the violence and low-income struggles of these children’s lives. His lines pack a serious punch, particularly in “Roberto.” Many of the poems in this collection are like this. Remember that opening poem — the ball curves, and this is how each poem reads in Miller’s collection.

From "Kind of Blue" (pg. 15)

....A player swung
and sent a fly ball toward the outfield
fence. It went foul at the last moment
like love or a marriage striking an
empty wooden seat and bouncing
back to the field.

I had to look up Tommy John surgery, which I found out is the reconstruction of ligaments in the elbow and it’s a surgery most often done on pitchers. I like baseball and have written my own baseball poems, but mine are nothing like Miller’s poems. From a World Series played by survivors of earthquakes and climate change in “The World Series” to the hope that you’ll be remembered after the spring time of your youth in “Free Agent,” Miller’s baseball metaphors are larger than life, much like Whitey Ford and others who have played America’s favorite pastime.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

E. (Eugene) Ethelbert Miller was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1950. He attended Howard University and received a BA in African American studies in 1972. A self-described “literary activist,” Miller is on the board of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, and has served as director of the African American Studies Resource Center at Howard University since 1974. His collections of poetry include Andromeda (1974), The Land of Smiles and the Land of No Smiles (1974), Season of Hunger / Cry of Rain (1982), Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? (1986), Whispers, Secrets and Promises (1998), and How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (2004).

Miller is the editor of the anthologies Women Surviving Massacres and Men (1977); In Search of Color Everywhere (1994), which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a Book of the Month Club selection; and Beyond the Frontier (2002). He is the author of the memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (2000).

The mayor of Baltimore made Miller an honorary citizen of the city in 1994. He received a Columbia Merit Award in 1993 and was honored by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House in 2003. Miller has held positions as scholar-in-residence at George Mason University and as the Jessie Ball DuPont Scholar at Emory & Henry College. He has conducted writing workshops for soldiers and the families of soldiers through Operation Homecoming.