Heart of the Order
Baseball Poems
Gabriel Fried (Editor), Foreword by Daniel Okrent

This anthology gathers together some of the finest poems written on baseball from the past seventy-five years. They represent the entire spectrum of verse-writing about the National Pastime, from stickball and sandlot games to Little League and the Majors, from spectators to scrubs to superstars.  In a myriad of voices—earnest to zany—they capture baseball's poetic sensibility, its rhythms, culture, and timelessness.  They evoke memories of youth and promise, of growing up and growing older. They bring us back to our personal and collective pasts.

Included in the roster are Hall-of-Famers and contemporary All-Stars: Richard Hugo, Marianne Moore, William Matthews, May Swenson, B. H. Fairchild, Linda Gregerson, Donald Hall, Yusef Komunyakaa, Edward Hirsch, Thomas Lux, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Quincy Troupe, and more than sixty others.

“A welcome addition to growing corpus of baseball poetry. Fried. . .has a keen ear for the sound of good baseball poetry and a good eye for a good baseball tale.”
—Kenneth Sammond, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature

“Baseball has a long history and season. While instant replay is the newest (though not terribly reliable) way to capture it, the carefully chosen words in Heart of the Order, conveying enthusiasm or disappointment and every emotion in between, remain one of the truest ways to experience it.”
—Patricia Contino, New Pages

Original Trade Paperback / $17.95 (Can $19.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-435-5 / 184 pages / Sports / Poetry / Anthology