"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.