Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow

Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow is superb. This is the star treatment Negro League baseball has always deserved. Hooks Tinker's press row seat and Josh Gibson's storied life provide the perfect points of view for this intimate examination of Black life between the bases. Dorian Hairston winds up and delivers inning after inning of masterfully crafted historical poems with an insider's view of the truth that lets the reader swing at a Satchel Paige fastball, celebrate a Gibson home run, and witness a love for the game that sometimes failed to love you back. If it's the bottom of the ninth, the bases are loaded, and you're up to bat, you'll want this book in your hands.

~Frank X Walker, author of A is for Affrilachia and Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York

Whitman once wrote that baseball is “our game… America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws…” Indeed, our poets have written about the game since it’s beginning: the rivalries, the face-offs, the smack-talk, the physics of the ball slicing the air, the crack of the bat, the reversals of fortune that turn on the snap of a wrist, the traditions and superstitions on and off the field, the long lulls in action, the fleet feet that lunge for the ball, the base, the player. Baseball, America’s pastime, as American as apple pie, as American as segregation. Dorian Hairston’s debut collection Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson is a novel in verse, an epic tale that draws its language from the brash, bravado of dugout dozens, but behind the hyperbole lies the undeniable truth of Gibson’s game. This is baseball poetry in a league of its own. And it has it all: the hero worship, the fastballs and faster bats, the curveballs and quick eyes, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, rum and women. It is the story of the Negro league told through the life and loves of Josh Gibson. It is the story of America. Hairston takes up Hughs’ response to Whitman and shows us in his verse how beautiful Black ball was, how beautiful it is. 

~Jeremy Paden, author of "ruina montium" and editor of Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets