Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Once Read as Ruin is centered on the domestic, aesthetics, intimacies between humans and human and animal, and union's faltering. The speakers in these poems probe expectation and dream, deconstruct and construct intimacy through relationships with humans and animals, like horses, rabbits, dogs, mice, and more. The titular poem was a finalist for Rabbit Catastrophe's Real Good Poem Prize.

Is the egg obvious? Witek's visual text candles language in this volume of discovery, overjoyed and overwhelmed by the maps that link body and vocabulary through egg and ova. Behind this text is a poet with two mother tongues, playing between Portuguese and English with skill and beauty-yoking words. These poems know that hatchlings imprint on their caretaker, but the tether is mutual. Just as the ovum, and the fetus it later becomes, leaves behind its trace in the body as dna not the parent's own. We are thus connected to our little eggs much like the thread with a needle on each end in Witek's text: pierced and sutured in perpetual equipoise. With beauty and humor, bravery and brio, this book illuminates hidden connections. Bravo!-Amaranth BorsukIn The Rattle Egg, Terri Witek addresses the egg of Clarice Lispector's story "The Egg and the Chicken" as a gender/genre of primal oddity. As a "terrain of foundational impressions, "the geometry of eggness" is both intimate and comically vast: the suspended egg, the performative egg, the baby rattle. What of the consumable egg-in-a-carton, cushioned in a cardboard grid, or the egghead with her sheets of graph paper seeking formulas for brokenness? With multiple visual and verbal recombinations, Witek wonders if the egg writes back. Herein the delight! What does it mean to be responsible and tender to the absurd worlds outside you and also in you, "the smeared gold apostrophe"?-Vidhu Aggarwal¿

"It is time the stone took the trouble to bloom" Paul Celan once wrote, and in Lacy Snapp's visionary poems just about everything does. This is a world of trees, brick, flowers, seed pods, but also ghosts from her past and her family history, and the two define and redefine each other in a way that instill in her-and us-a "cosmic affirmation." Snapp must be considered one of our important new ecological poets who have redefined the scope of ecology as a more encompassing and complex vision of the world, one seen as an "Intricate being made of fire and flight." In lush, flowing lines, she carries us on that flight. I can't think of a more timely poetry for our depleted environment, or for our souls.-Richard Jackson, author of Where The Wind Comes From and Broken HorizonsBeyond the elements that bind us to our earthly lives is the ethereal element of time. Whether a reminder of its passing in 15-minute increments from a wormy chestnut clock or in the heartpine measured and dovetailed in the basement for her great-grandmother's coffin, Lacy Snapp's narrative of carpentry shines in her debut chapbook, Shadows on Wood. Each board, each family legend, whorls its own universe: "a cosmic affirmation that I will also continue / to change, evolve as I pull, pull from what's around me... wondering / what future story a two-inch slice of my soul will tell." Snapp gazes into time's grain and rings to see herself more clearly-and invites us to do the same.-Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky EarthThe images in Lacy Snapp's indelible Shadows on Wood immerse readers into the grains and textures of various woods and the memories and associations they invoke. Such poems as "Heartpine" and "Wormy Chestnut" guide us through the deep lineage of labor as we get to know a young woman who learns woodworking as a centerpiece of her family's legacy. In other poems, like "Becoming a Ghost," we are drawn into the contemporary life of a speaker who moves through the world with her own unseen companions. Lacy Snapp knows shadows and wood the way painters know the delicacy or coarseness of their brush tips. She conveys her perceptions through exquisite detail and piercing emotion- beauty and heartbreak walk hand-in-hand here and their impact will linger long after this book has been read, set aside, and then read again.-Jesse Graves, Author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Merciful Days

In this collection, poems mirror and oppose each other-ancient Jewish texts and tradition coexist alongside the hubbub of modern family life; tenderness and longing alongside foreshadowed regret and loss; the horrors of terrorism beside the making of bread. That wit and humor exist with yearning for relief from, and deep commitment to, the quotidian is this poet's enviable gift. There is a long matriarchal line of which Aviva Siegel is a part but there is no voice of motherhood like hers. She is descended from the grit and wisdom of the Old Testament's Sarah and Hagar, and she is determined, in beautifully crafted and original narratives, to be certain the lineage of strong and gentle women, exhausted and devoted mothers, female speakers of truth and resilience, is not forgotten-that it is, in fact, ignited and redefined in this welcoming debut.-Barbara Rockman, author of Sting and Nest, winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and "to cleave," winner of the National Press Women Book Prize and Finalist for the International Book Award

I believe it is possible-in fact, it is highly likely-that the reader will lose herself in these rare and exquisite poems, where we are seduced by hue and honey...stars flung, comets crashing...where morning is waiting just outside the door. For Judy Hood's debut poetry collection, to live in this world, glows brilliant with hope and the sustenance of guava, mango, tamarind, and Florida Florida Florida in all its inland glut and glory, its frangipani gardens, baby palms, and avocado groves, the way everything springs abundant even now, in this pandemic time when we need it most. I've read Hood's words over and over, on the way to, coming from, and I've felt the honesty in them along with their lush and lyrical beauty and the comfort they so generously give. They engage me on a cellular level. I feel heard.-Maureen Seaton, author of UnderseaJudy Hood crafts these marvelous poems with a gardener's patience and loving attention. Teeming with frangipani, poinciana and tamarind, the lush landscape of these poems renews my belief that it is indeed a miracle to live in this world.-Mia Leonin, Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child. Lovely, lyrical, and graceful, these pieces lift from the page like songs from a pure soul.-Diana Abu-Jaber, Life Without a Recipe

All of us, from bumpkins to artists, are always picking up and carrying on. Intimacies, skepticism, transformation, scars: these are things that also happen to be common to, and woven into, the fabric of lyric poems. In Natalia Prusinska's Hard Jolts of Hope, we encounter a poet whose preoccupations take us to a place where Emerson's remark that the mission of American poetry is to show us the power of surprise comes to mind. Here the "jolt" of the title lands us squarely in the ambit of this aesthetic, passionate and stunning in its immediacy and frankness. The language is terse and sharp, bristling with intelligence and precision. Think of a mashup of Creeley, Olds, and Lockwood. And feelingly memorable. That's the thing that every poet wants and Prusinska can claim.-David Rigsbee, author of This Much I Can Tell You and Not Alone in My Dancing: Essays and Reviews

I save very good poems to read late at night-it's late at night."-Bob Arnold author of Once In Vermont, Gnomon Press

What Kind of Seed Made You is a collection of desert inspired poems, uprooting what blooms and burns within us. Featuring Best of the Net nominated work 'on visiting Joshua Tree while two simultaneous brush fires burn in Thermal, CA,' Rachael Inciarte writes Southern California and the Mojave Desert in the tone of the landscape-beautiful, bracing, and brutal.

Harris' poetic landscape is apocalypse, imagined and real. Full of hydroponic lettuce, empty cul-de-sacs, unrequited raptures, our own resilient bodies, and the intimacy of isolation-this is a dystopian collection to relish.-Amalie Flynn, author of Wife and War: The Memoirjust a stranger in a strange strange place-Kevin MorbyJan Harris's Isolating One's Priorities in a Time of Crisis reads like a mystic whispering danger where "the sounds of our own voices unimaginable" howl from a phantom of recycled mornings. Harris uses the ouroboros to circle around you as she guides you toward meaning in this chaotic time-Harris knows you are afraid, she doesn't take that away from you, she just joins you in empathy, almost as if "[o]ur lives ran parallel until we met in the knot." Isolating One's Priorities in a Time of Crisis contains palpable, surreal moments where the reader must confront the typhonic mind of the virtual human hollow-gram we have been hiding behind. She guides the reader through this human terror of monotony in time, yet still she guides your eyes to the living stars, "declaring that the stars / are not dead but are hidden / from one another like us." Harris's work is one you read again and again because her love for lavishing language cannot be denied. I will never stop learning from Jan Harris-you are safe with Harris as she shows you the darkness, but softly reminds you that the "wildflowers crowd [the] meadows and in the shadows / green things begin to grow." Harris's writing is gritty, surreal, and intrepid.-Robyn Leigh Lear, Poetry Editor for WAXING & WANING: A LITERARY JOURNAL and Creative Director for April Gloaming Publishing-and forever a student of Dr. Jan from long ago

The Inviolable Hours, by Amber Rose Crowtree, is a chapbook of poems that follows a poet from childhood into adulthood in New England. Her poem, "A 1987 Photo of Female Destinies," won award through The Center for the Arts, Lake Sunapee Region, for contest "Snapshots in Time," final judge, Alexandrea Peary 2020, New Hampshire Poet Laureate.

In this collection of poetry, Megeen R. Mulholland presents a fascinating arrangement of text and image in which family photos set parallel to the text engender poems and in turn forge a relation to her photographer father who died in the poet's infancy. Kodachrome slides like the train cars they depict convey the past into the present, while the selected camera angles shoot beyond the frames into a future that remains to be sorted and formed. Mulholland invites readers to build an unbroken whole from pieces of the past, demonstrating how to look and reconstruct from life's scattered moments. Through her father's artistry, his exploration in images of trains and travel-metaphors for mechanical innovation and psychic expansion (the stuff of poetry!)-Megeen crosses the divide, both literally in photographs of the continental divide and figuratively, as she traverses spaces of material absence to form a constant, her father's presence in her life. The provocative images left by her father of lone and separated train cars seem to yearn for the elusive promises of new destinations; but the gathered mementos, like her image of spokes that surround and diagram a train's engine, lead to family and its archeology of shared genes and philosophy. A steamer trunk in "Passages," and the poems "Proof" and "Encircled by the Engraved Band" show how objects displaced and uncoupled from their first purpose but preserved in poetry continue to carry and transmit the past. Mulholland is a poet who deserves recognition and a wide readership.-Mary Evans, Professor, Hudson Valley Community CollegeWhat Megeen R. Mulholland achieves in Crossing the Divide is something altogether impossible: the ability to take us on a quick but profound journey through grief over lost parents and transmute it into a conversation of all the things that make life worth living. Using the convention of old pictures and slides inherited after their passing, the author penetrates into the surface of each photographic stop along the way to find the truth of character underneath, and her discoveries come to resonate very quickly as our own. So much more than just a personal journey into the generations of her Irish immigrant family, Crossing the Divide is the sort of work that you not only enjoy reading once, but want to allow to sit, brew, and then consume again, savoring the piquancy that mellows richer and deeper with each reading.-Gram Slaton, Author of Spider LakeThese poems, tender, family stories, shaped in narrow lines like train tracks or the shape of rail cars, are compelling because they are built of images of things, like images in photographs are in the language of cameras-"no idea but in things" as WC Williams said. The poet starts with trying to find the image of a father she never knew except in family stories and the photographs he left behind. But that inevitably takes the poet to her mother with the children and the mother's loss, and strength, the story of a couple, of the remnants of what makes memory that becomes the story.-Dan Wilcox, Albany Poets

How to chronicle a lifetime? If it can be done at all, it must be in poems like this, written straight from the heart and spanning a decade, plainspoken, and lyrical with authentic and earned emotion. Here, the author's life is written in life-affirming odes like "Dancing with the Stars" and in aching elegies like "Cue the Bagpipes," often with a rapier wit ("Bifocals"). Powerful feelings and memories from a long life, richly lived.-Rebecca Foust, 2017-19 Marin County Poet LaureateLes Bernstein's poetry is poignant, sacred, stinging in its truthfulness while somehow still comforting. She touches deep roots of feeling.-Lilly Tartikoff Karatz, Philanthropist and Co-founder of Revlon UCLA Women's Cancer Research ProgramWhen I immersed myself in Loose Magic, assimilating these poems one after another,an inner alchemy began. Soon, seemingly unbidden, a deep voice arose from within and said."Oh... this is about Me." Sit down, Loose Magic is precious food for the soul.-Raz Ingrasci, Chairman Hoffman Institue InternationalIn Loose Magic, Les Bernstein has masterfully woven a moving tapestry of sublime language and visual imagery rooted in the ordinary, everyday experiences that make our hearts both soar and break-all at the same time.-Karen Tiber Leland, best selling author The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand

There is a music in these poems that works magic with the particularity of the images to create a whole body experience out of which willows, swans and bison rise as if from within our own being, untamed and untameable. In Measureless Silence, Christine Mulvey has composed a symphony of words that sings the wonder and devastation that is our world. Each poem is a summons, whether through the "wrap of forest" or the harsh light of "glitz and bling", to discover ourselves as the wild itself: pristine, ravaged, and innocent as snow, as wings, as wind.-Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem: the Transformative Power of WordsCris Mulvey's Measureless Silence is an ode to the vast, wild open spaces of Montana and the Western United States, and also to the wildness within. In gorgeous, lyrical language and sensuous imagery, she celebrates "everything uncaptured,/ undefiled/...all that cannot be,/ that still refuses/ to be/ tamed." Mountains, prairies, bison, rivers "and this sky,/ unfathomable,/ thundering/with magnificent/indifference"-these are the true protagonists of these poems, while the self becomes vulnerable and insignificant, yet also finds itself at home in this stark wilderness, seen in winter. By contrast, the poems set in cityscapes show a tawdry poverty of soul there, in which the narrator feels "hollow-boned with longing" to return to the wild. "Come with me out to where the soft round shapes/ of the fallen snow lie draped across the bushes like the thighs/ and hips of a sleeping god curled up on the open bedspread of the land," Mulvey invites, and we are eager to follow her through this beautiful collection of poems.-Maxima Kahn, author of Fierce AriaThis poet knows the wild. In this collection she invites us to trust our senses and our longing, to enter a sacristy of sensuality and song, to remember what is holy in the untamed within and without. Even in the few poems where the soulless isolation of the city or human intervention reminds us of our own separation, the poet returns us over and over to the sacred and the sensuous, to mystery, lifting our eyes from our lowly state to something more, to our connection with everything uncaptured, to the wild, to the "feral silence" of heaven on earth.-Mary Jo Amani, MFA, Pacific University

I am doing everything wrong. From this first line of the first poem in Sit Wild, Mo Fowler's words rush headlong at the frustrations of modern life; her persona searches for meaning in the gulf between self-doubt and confidence. These are poems of the gig economy, told by a character who's fighting to put it all together. Even as the speaker bemoans a litany of overbearing male customers in the hardware store where she works, she's trying so hard, trying to be "better": Don't they know / I am trying to write a poem about how I / am so strong. Fowler's poems critique a world we don't want to live in but probably already inhabit. I am taken by the urgency and the energy of Sit Wild. This is a remarkable first collection.-Bob Stanley, Poet Laureate of Sacramento, 2009-2012Sit Wild is a testament to having a dream, trying to chase it, and keeping yourself alive in the meantime.-Andrea Busch

With concise, vivid language, Bob Brown's poetry brings us into the prison of hard time. We sit with him on "small plastic chairs"...learning the yearnings of the incarcerated. The violence in these lives is not avoided in the poems. Yet, Brown's compassion and truth from these encounters resonates. If there is a theology of hope among the stories, then maybe coming to God will turn a life around. Hard Times: Poems of Enclosure is a succinct and compelling look at life behind the bars. These poems reveal in stark language those ...Who are "The Unknown." "The Unnamed."-Sandra McGarry The root of the word "despair" is away from hope. And yet these poems, poems of empathy, build human bridges toward hope, though never with ease. As the poet visits men in jail, responding to a request from his parish priest, he wonders, "Could they see my past in my face-years clean and sober now?" Into this place of imprisoned men, a place where time is hard, comes a visitor bringing word of forgiveness, but listening deeply, to the story and to the story under the story. Of the drunk driver, the murderer, the addict, the abuser. Stories in which every choice made has made a difference. And it becomes clear that the contact the poet makes is essential to him as well. In one case, a murder is interrupted by a man who arrives, knowing he needed to be there. Someone who left, "Unknown. / Unnamed." In another, the visitor doesn't know the outcome: "I never learned / the disposition / of his case." The poems themselves are largely narrative and simple on the surface; they reflect the spare setting. But as the reader enters the poems, much is revealed about what it means to be human. When a meeting is interrupted by a lockdown, the poet writes, "Also locked down, / I prayed for him." The interruptions occur often but do not deter the visitor, who offers his humanity, compassion, attention, and belief.-Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan, & it had rained, Thresh & Hold, and Swan, What Shores?I'm grateful for these poems in which Bob Brown chronicles his time as a lay religious counselor serving prison inmates. His reports offer sustained insight into how we come to be who we are, insight into the souls of those who daily return to relative freedom and those who may never be free again. Along the way, the poems imply we might well ask ourselves which is which.-ROMTVEDT

Betsy Littrell's Dragon in my Purse weaves into gold the clutter of contemporary American life, the ambiguities of family, the messiness of homes animated by actual people living actual lives. Littrell's poems summon an achingly sensual picture of motherhood, give glimpses-almost confessional, at times-into the life of a woman navigating her desires and their cultural and biological roots. The rehearsal of imagined play with a daughter who never was ends with a body crumpled on the floor, with blood and flowers and the scent of baby powder. Sensitive to the magic of the quotidian, the resonances of little moments too often neglected in the rush of our contemporary moment, Littrell testifies to the power of poetic knowledge and its ability to animate the world, to give form to chaos, to create life-or a life-in only twenty-two poems.-Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. Professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Diego State University and author of Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry (Wayne State UP, 2007) & Strong Measures (Make Now, 2007)In pastel tones, Betsy Littrell captures the clarity and urgency of care in poems softly wrought and beautifully folded. With meticulous imagery and a sensorium embedded in floral, wood, and crepuscular realms, the poems in this collection move us gently beyond individual self to collective need. From the "memory center" to the "washing wool" to the beloved "freckled face," these heartfelt songs call us to recall how "the lone pine smells like an entire forest," how deeply the forest depends on the single tree. -S$, Penn Sound, 1913 , Leave Your Body Behind, The Yesterday Project, Poetry Foundation

Meg Reynolds has found her voice in the niche genres of diary comics and visual poetry. She excels in both elements of this hybrid genre: her skills as a writer and artist come together to form this powerful book. The content is vulnerable, honest, and effective. The characters are amusing, tragic, and sexy. The speaker sings and shouts from the page through tears and laughter and over spilled wine and ink. She reaches out to the reader with tenderness, loneliness, and agency. Meg's book will find its place on my shelf of visual poets, in a position of honor with the texts of Edward Gorey, Lynda Barry, Maira Kalman, and Bianca Stone. Each page is a poetic diary entry, illuminated with Meg's eerily beautiful drawings. These passages are ripe with puns, double entendres, tales of loss, and evidence of personal growth. This is a stunning accomplishment.-Frances Cannon, author of The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big Little FrankMelancholy and wry observation pervades the pages of Meg Reynolds's collection, A Comic Year. Part captain's log, part comic, part memoir and part instruction manual, this litany of days takes us on a journey of honest reflection. The candid voice, hilarious and adept at pointing out what it's like to be a poet and artist dating, is paired with sharp fine-line drawings, with enchanting detail and composition. Meg Reynolds is a natural comics artist, with the sensibility of a poet. Here we get the best of both worlds. -BIANCA STONE, author of The Mobius Strip Club of GriefA Comic Year is intimate, patient, and breath-taking. What is on the surface the story of a year in the life of a woman following a breakup unfolds and explodes into gorgeous layers of complexity, masterfully weaving together themes of love, desire, safety, family, poetry, time, and longing. Poems and drawings are at one turn heartbreaking, and then suddenly very funny, and then awe-inspiring and back again. Altogether, it is an indescribable triumph; a book that is just as much about everyone alive as it is about the author. Reynolds has given us a true gift.-Sophie Lucido Johnson, author of Many LoveVirginia Woolf wrote, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" in A Room of One's Own. Meg Reynolds wrote, "I'm on my own again...My love for myself achieved delicate (precarious) purchase when I bought myself a sandwich: a BLT. Obviously". Reynolds was not afraid of releasing "the flying doubt monkeys from their brain cage" in her poetry comic, while she was a castaway in an urban desert. The documentary was a catharsis of sorts, with her and her micron pens & graphite drawing pencils. "To portray something in art is to worship it and make record. Here, I make an icon of my bedroom window. I pray to this close thing." I felt her energy in this book -survive- and I'm glad she did.-Naoko Fujimoto

A thoughtful and accessible debut, Even in the Slums of Providence explores elements that define our lives-love, family, work, aging, faith. Through these poems, Larry Pike travels a long arc of experience to appreciation and understanding of the gifts, great and small, we receive: wearing thin a lawn during a neighborhood ball game; dealing with a rugged, worldly coworker on a first job; savoring mint juleps with dear friends; watching a grandmother admire her teenaged grandson on Christmas Eve; mourning a friend's father at a socially-distanced funeral. Readers will find much in their own lives reflected in the emotion and humor of these poems. Born in Georgia and raised in North Carolina, Pike has lived in Kentucky for forty-five years. The strong Southern emphases on home and place clearly influence his work. He employs a keen eye to enlarge and enliven ordinary events (enjoying ice cream at a sidewalk café), as well as the harrowing (facing a wild, illegal border crossing) and majestic (viewing a nighttime Space Shuttle launch at close range). Even in the Slums of Providence is a warm, unpretentious collection. It celebrates, sometimes wryly, common occurrences, such as learning to drive, an afternoon at the movies or watching newlyweds hunting for a home on HGTV, going with one's dad to buy dress shoes, and running a routine errand. The poems marvel at special times that connect us to one another and the world around us. They also help us consider critical life questions, like the injustices we incite and endure and our mortality. Even when contemplating difficult themes, these verses reveal a grateful, inquisitive observer happily at work. The poems are grouped in three sections. The volume begins with "In the Driveway," which won the 2003 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Award, and includes the 2017 George Scarbrough Prize winner, "Wildflower Walk." The book's title comes from a line in the closing poem, "On Seeing the Van Goghs in Chicago." Poems in this collection have appeared in a number of journals, including Better Than Starbucks, Capsule Stories, Cæsura (web edition), Exposition Review, Fathom Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, Jelly Bucket and River and South Review, and several anthologies, including Heat the Grease, We're Frying Up Some Poetry and the New York Quarterly Foundation's Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith.