The Black Bat

Simon Pole’s book of poetry, The Black Bat: A Supernatural Baseball Epic, published by Robot Rider Press (2025) presents a masterful craft of a body of sonnets gleaming with storytelling magnitudinal in scope. In weaving together the plot points of a baseball game with supernatural elements, Pole elevates the sonnet form and the passion for baseball.    

This epic would be an ideal text in an English classroom when teaching the sonnet style, especially engaging young readers who like baseball, and other readers alike when grappling with the composite way a story can be threaded through in the skeleton of poetry. 

The supernatural elements of The Black Bat succeeded in accentuating what could be a simple sports game, the passion felt in belonging to a team and the love of a sport.

The Black Bat calls on a sports culture permeated by superstition and spiritual belief that players bring to the game. I was not fully appreciative or knowing of this culture and the thin veil between this world and the next for them. I was also not fully aware of the belief in fate of the baseball player’s success resting in the hands of the ethereal. Pole brings the reader into this world seamlessly with the creation of a ghostly black bat. 

The bat is a fully developed character in its own right. The bat originates from a tree struck by lightning, a dead tree on a hill, “for from its branches nooses hung,/ With dangling corpses were they decked,/ And dirges mournful phantoms sung,/ Enticing sailors to be wrecked.” The very existence of the bat that will be crafted from that tree permeates a gothic and haunting tone of the epic poem. 

Pole exudes his capacity for storytelling in giving a ghostly tone with the carver of the bat himself. An outlawed carver, having grown tired from ‘good topics,’ ‘pornographic’ sculptures, blasphemy, “in vileness so it was he stewed,/ Conjuring up depictions lewd.” His carvings lead ‘folks astray,’ “so they him outlawed: stay away!” The carver pulses with disdain and rage, he melds this rage into the bat. “And like a snake its rough skin shed/ And stood revealed: the spawn of hell,” a bat that exuded hate.

Yet, the supernatural is braided in with the bat’s birthing. “For on its barrel, right around,/ As if by phantom hand there writ/ A string of cursive letters wound,/ In silver laid, and brightly lit:/ “Created from a demon seed,/ Upon the souls of men I feed.” And that is what happens, the bat descends and feeds.  

At the end of the poem, Pole gives context to the baseball teams, situating the story in real life. “The play of this epic takes place within the Lake Counties Baseball Association (LCBA), comprising the historical Ontario counties of Essex, Kent and Lambton. West and East Divisions.” A believable setting, where the unbelievable will unfold.

As I read through The Black Bat, I envisioned a movie scene of how the game began to play out. A game of godly proportions, haunted and violent, I was not expecting the trajectory of the game that Pole would lead me through. 

There are many memorable moments of this game, some disturbing that I cannot reveal fully to avoid giving spoilers. To hook you, the first astronomical occurrence pertains to a boy watching the game, “the ball breaks through his empty seat/ And pegs itself deep in concrete.” I reread those lines several times to get a grip on the extent of the stakes of the game. 

For every epic storyline, there needs to be a hero, and that hero does show up in the form of the bat’s nemesis, a holy and angelic baseball with the power to counter the demonic forces of the bat. “A blessed baseball, thrown by the pitcher, “How could a baseball be so blessed?”” As the ball countered forces with the bat, it takes on an otherworldly persona. Blue light streaks from it, a heavenly charge and even at the point of flight, the ball stops midflight appearing as if divine intervention has interceded. “But at its highest point of flight,/ Where kites and rockets touch the sky,/ The baseball stopped, as if held tight,/ by what is unseen to the eye./ did powers greater intervene.” Misting and hissing, this blessed ball became a character in its own right as well. 

Simon Pole is a Canadian poet based in Kingsville, Ontario, whose work occupies the strange territory where speculative fiction, mythology, spirituality, horror, and epic poetry converge. A graduate of Harvard University, Pole describes his practice as “Cosmic Poetry,” a form of writing deeply informed by both the supernatural imagination of horror cinema and the atmosphere and symbolism of old churches. His literary inheritance is equally distinctive as the great-great-grandson of early Canadian poet Susie Drury. His substantial body of work includes The Saga of Terminal City, a seven-part urban epic originally published between 2012 and 2015 and later collected in The Saga of Terminal City: The Complete Urban Epic, as well as The Cook and the Cold: Collected Narrative Verse, Poems For Ocean: Collected Lyric Poetry, Like a Lamb: Collected Sacred Poetry, Far Out Is Doom: A Sacred Epic and The Black Bat: A Supernatural Baseball Epic. 

His interests range from a verse adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu to sacred poetry and supernatural narrative, revealing a writer whose imagination consistently crosses the boundaries between the earthly and the cosmic. The Black Bat was named a finalist for the 2025 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book. Through his books and his Cook & Crank: The Cosmic Poetry Podcast, where he performs and discusses his work, Pole continues to develop a singular poetic universe in which baseball diamonds, urban landscapes, churches, monsters, gods and cosmic forces become part of the same imaginative terrain.

Robot Rider Press emerges as an independent publishing imprint with a distinct literary sensibility, one drawn toward the strange territories where poetry, myth, horror, spirituality, and the speculative imagination converge. The Press’ 2025 catalogue includes Simon Pole’s The Cook and the Cold: Collected Narrative Verse, Far Out is Doom: A Sacred Epic, Like a Lamb: Collected Sacred Poetry, Poems for Ocean: Collected Lyric Poetry, and The Saga of Terminal City, alongside The Black Bat. With a sustained interest in ambitious, genre-blurring works that resist easy distinctions between poetry and narrative, the sacred and the uncanny, Robot Rider Press finds an especially unexpected form with The Black Bat, bringing the mythic scale of the epic and the darkness of supernatural fiction onto the country baseball diamond. 

The result is a book that feels characteristic of a press willing to follow literature into unusual territory, where the everyday can become haunted and the familiar game of baseball can open onto questions of existence and what we even play the game for. 

Thank you to Simon Pole and Robot Rider Press for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.