The fifty-eight year Easter Monday baseball rivalry between North Carolina State University and Wake Forest University had a the traditional fraternity celebration known as the PIKA Ball, held on the NC State campus, that followed it on Monday evening. Told from the view point of sports journalists, players, fans, and PIKA members, the narrative reveals the excitement and developing strategies as the contest traverses several baseball eras. At the height of its popularity, the game drew astonishingly large crowds of spectators, many of whom were absentee government workers, providing the impetus for the North Carolina State Legislature to declare Easter Monday to be a state holiday.

In baseball, as in much poetry, beauty comes from tension. Groundrules and boundaries confine those who would play, but the best find ways to exploit their strictures, and just as the daring base runner takes second on a fly to right, the practiced poet trips the sleepy reader with a surprise rhyme, bold line break, or a jarring reversal of foot. Its no surprise, then, that hardball has a larger body of literature than other sports, or that aficionados are more likely than others to quote lines of verse in support of the game they love. This is Tim Peelers second book of poems from baseball. It contains some of his most moving and best-crafted poetry. Starting with time-honored themes--fathers and sons, baseball and time, memory and the nation, team and player and loyalty--the poet adapts the universal to the local and personal, proving that baseball, with its easy accommodation of reflection, remains a powerful tool for mining our individual and collective history.

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.