This probing book of poetry is structured around one man's quest for healing and salvation. From his high school years in Texas during the early 1960s through his college teaching career 30 years later, the male persona of these poems searches for his lost father, for forgiveness and faith, for love and family. Throughout the collection, seven poems trace events from Saint Paul's quest for healing, proving a complement to the struggles of the contemporary man. The miracle that is life is chronicled here in terse and moving poems. The Vietnam Vet Looks for His Sons at Summer Basketball Camp Basketballs drum the floor. A hundred hearts race up and down the court. Intent as salmon leaping up the falls, these middle schoolers drive for backboards, spin lay ups through the hoops. Young men on the evening news slam chunks of metal down a pipe they aim toward towns where other boys draw circles in the dirt, spill out their bags of marbles. "Vivid and touching . . . from Vietnam to North Hollywood, from Abilene to Damascus [Fink] lay[s] permanent claim to a wide territory."―X. J. Kennedy

The Tongues of Men and of Angels (Ttup Invited Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Fink, Robert A.

Poetry

Texas Tech University Press

Stalking Joy (Walt McDonald First-Book Series)

Benbow, Margaret

“Twilight Innings is packed with sometimes painful, sometimes funny, but always insightfully drawn experiences that come from everyday life. Fink’s essays have a beginning, middle, and an end. They have characters. They are stories that take you into the corners of his personal world, and it’s a trip worth making. “—Ken Hammond“In these essays Fink puts himself in the middle of the diamond as in the middle of things American, and readers are grateful to be witnesses to the informed heart, the discriminate sympathy, the keen yet modest intelligence, the deftness of his prose strokes.” —Bruce Smith“In the interstices of silence, a spoken word is—paradoxically—dangerously inappropriate and yet desperately desired. Any word uttered must be sure, apt, and, above all, honest. Bob Fink speaks into the void with just such infallible assurance and disarming candor.” —Steve Weathers"In this wise collection of essays Bob Fink leads himself and readers into the lessons nobody trains us for, past survivor’s guilt into survivor’s empathy. Whether writing about the psychological echoes of his military service as an officer ('the young leading the young') in Vietnam, or the death by cancer of poet Jane Kenyon, or entering the small beauties of kindness that visited the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire, or reflecting into the pleasures and metaphoric resonances of baseball, Fink is an amiable witness of what it means to live and teach with faith and compassion."—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Writing the Sacred into the Real“[I am] not really surprised at all to learn that Bob, who has always made good, if occasionally oblique, use of his life experiences in his poems, has done so even more directly in a companionable genre. Those who admire his poems, as I and many others do, will be pleased to learn more here about the man (and about the woman who stands behind, beside, and sometimes in front of him).” —R. S. Gwynn, from the ForewordPreviously published in the Cortland Review, Concho River Review, the Iowa Review, the Mississippi Review, River Teeth, the Texas Review, Texas Magazine, and other journals, Robert A. Fink’s essays—joyful, sorrowful, nostalgic, gently sardonic—are collected here for the first time. With a poet’s sensibility, Fink explores his memories of Vietnam; the satisfaction he finds in running; the beauty, order, and grace of baseball; and the necessity of laughter, and of laughing at ourselves.Robert A. Fink is W. D. and Hollis R. Bond Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. He is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Tracking the Morning.

Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace and Survival

Essays & Correspondence

While baseball may have long been considered an all-American sport in which a melting pot could celebrate ethnic heroes like Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Connie Mack, and Stan Musial, racial segregation excluded blacks from an otherwise democratic picture. Such was certainly the case in Texas, where, in the state’s first professional matchup soon after the Civil War, the R. E. Lees faced the Stonewalls―and African Americans, not surprisingly, played no part. Drawing upon oral histories and mining such rare sources as rosters and box scores from black newspapers, Rob Fink situates the semiprofessional West Texas Colored League against the rise and decline of professional Negro Leagues. From the 1880s Galveston Flyaways through Dallas shortstop Ernie Banks’s signing with the Chicago Cubs in 1953, Playing in Shadows brings to light an important but little-studied inning in American sport.

Playing in Shadows: Texas and Negro League Baseball (Sport in the American West)

History

Americas

These poems of reminiscence focus on love, loss, and the oddities of life in small-town Texas.

Tracking the Morning

Wings Press

The thematic motif found within these poems is one of "knowing": the desire to know the mystery of love in its many forms and depths. Examining daily living, this book’s four-section poem sequence is one of immersion into the paradoxical life; familiar yet filled with inexplicable beauty. As it investigates displacement from family, from love, and from self, this compilation discovers that the mundane transpires in an austere and holy place peopled with angels unaware, that faith can exist in a place of stone—absolution is available daily—and that redemption is found in strange places.

Strange You Never Knew

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