Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Flock's The Scientist's Wife is a solution, not a resolution: The many variables of enduring love float in a murky suspension-what do we know, how do we transact, what are the impediments within the boundaries of commitment?-that Flock's poems, one by one, clarify. Her work is what science terms "elegant": shrewd, exacting, and necessary.-Michael J. Rosen, author, poet, and painter

These poems open the door to the mysterious, sensual, and luminous place that sustains and gives dimension to our everyday lives-where our dreams keep watch over our possible selves, the music of words lullabies what we may have forgotten or excluded, and we find healing in intimate connection with other lives. The journey up glass mountain is both a slippery and a revelatory one that lifts our glass to the light-- making transparent both our wounds and our climb toward joy.

"A voice rich enough to carpet the walls and warm enough to provoke the fondest of memories. Each of his poems is knee-deep in history; his poems are fingerprints of his life...."-Monica L. Piñon-Austin Chronicle"Whether he is writing of his grandmother in "La Partera" or of the way the rain speaks on a summer night, Robert René Galván is a poet who senses the link between music and language in a deep and intimate way."-Susan Hansen-San Marcos Daily Record"Robert René Galván has the gift of intuition every true poet should have; he knows instinctively how to pace the images embodied in his word sequences....he is able to fit the eye of the seer to the soft yet strong tissues of melody, sometimes even when pierced by the nature of cicadas."-Miguel González-Gerth"The poet is gifted with a fine ear and a keen eye. Intelligence and imagination are at work everywhere....Galván's is a rich voice, moving between simplicity and grandeur, a voice that speaks and sings, in turn, and almost always in praise of the life it finds."-David Wevill

Neil Kennedy's new book, A Jigsaw Puzzle is like no other book of poetry I have ever read. From the very beginning-Flower on the floor./Somebody has lost their bloom./I am very careful.-Kennedy pulls you in, though really, as with any jigsaw puzzle, you can enter anywhere and find yourself unable to stop being enchanted by this world that gets put together one tercet at a time. Birds of all species, one chickadee setting up its home into two birdhouses, music from next door, problematic snow, little Jesus at the gas station, hourglasses, cats and dogs, timepieces and shoelaces, software malfunctions in the forgiveness machine, hammer and teacup going home together, hesitating clouds deciding whether to cast shadows or not, daffodils breaching their contract, card catalogue in the junkyard with one drawer open-this poignantly quiet rhythm and boldly observant eye unfold a landscape that is defined often by the spaces between places and moments in time. In one of the occasional breaks of the tercet form the poet writes "Behind one man's voice" and then then there's space and then "Another man's voice." In the poems to which we turn for insight and illumination we often sense poet and shadow self, the two voices talking to each other and including us in the conversation. Kennedy's A Jigsaw Puzzle, offers you a conversation to which you will want to return again and again.-Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

Marianne Brems writes of many unsung offerings with the poet's eye for telling detail; the glory of dandelions reviled by gardeners but with myriad unexpected talents and uses, the hidden gifts of smaller shapes nestled among mountains "who speak through softer edges/and quieter voices/to reflective observers/no cameras in hand." You will find many unsung offerings in this perfectly titled book. Luckily for us, Brems plucks them up and sings them into being. These offerings we keep in our mind's eye; the journey of a leaf, the travels of a dandelion, the revealing of greater truths.-Lisa Meltzer Penn, author of Travelers Tales: Spain, Fabula Argentea and the novel The Siren DialoguesI adored this collection of elegant, witty, and insightful poems that sharpened my world view. By offering a wide range of observations on the world around her, Brems provides a deeper commentary for us as readers. Her defense of nature rings true as she asks us, in fact challenges us, to honor our living environment. Savor these gems!-Korie Pelka, author of the popular blog site, 3rd Act Gypsy

Supremely inventive, exact, and shivery in its timely connection to the language of an ancient civilization, Margaret Lee's Someone Else's Earth takes us to a place and time we have never belonged yet have always belonged; to the beginnings of lyric expression and the telescoping in and out of the world of isolated despair. Reading this intricate and deeply moving series of poems as human existence is threatened to be erased, Someone Else's Earth is constructed of bits and pieces of what remains of Sappho's verse, almost as sherds of pottery being fit back together. Keep this book by your bed, under your pillow, within easy reach. Someone Else's Earth awakens the Possible for everyone in every time.-Susan Kay Anderson, author of Mezzanine and Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast.Erasure is much in vogue these days as a literary technique, but Margaret Lee knows erasure is what has happened to almost all of the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. So, guided by the needs of our present moment, she has crafted a debut book of striking poems - erasure in reverse - poems that flesh out Sappho's fragments into her own (Margaret's) personal myth. Savor these poems and get a sense of an emerging poet whose life-long studies of ancient Greek language and literature inform a book displaying a love of language and deep thirst for purpose at a time we need it most.-Paul E Nelson, Founder of SPLAB, Author of A Time Before Slaughter/ Pig War: & Other Songs of CascadiaWhenever I read Sappho my heart breaks upon the fragments. With a few poems my heart takes off, but with many bits and pieces I am dashed upon the meagre debris. Margaret Lee adroitly, eloquently and relentlessly "knits up the ravell'd" remains of some of Sappho's scraps, weaving nothing less than a stunning damask. In so doing, Lee caresses those ancient words, ingeniously transforming remnants into revelations. Sappho's fragments become Lee's starting blocks. Lee runs with what is left as her words gather their own momentum and reach triumphantly what the Greeks would recognize as word-weaving par excellence.-Arthur J. Dewey, Professor Theology at Xavier University, is the author of Wisdom Notes: Theological Riffs on Life and Living.Sappho's lyrical poetry emerged in Greece more than 25 centuries ago, influencing early Romans like Horace and Seneca, and later poets who exploited her themes and syllabic patterns in their own work. Known as the Tenth Muse, she fascinated early European poets as well as modern scholars across the globe. Margaret Lee's debut collection does not attempt a rerun of the past, but instead riffs freely on Sapphic fragments in 21st century poems that are a delight to read. You will savor this delicious book.-Sandra Soli, poet and author

Mapping moments of deep attention and wonder, Forty Days in the Wilderness, Wandering invites its readers to contemplate the natural world, sacred wilderness, and devotional wandering through the 2020 Lenten season and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.Largely composed in conjunction with walks through Wisconsin's national forests and state parks, the collection began as a Lenten intention - a creative response to Muthupandiyan's desire to find the divine in a world that has largely destroyed wilderness - the natural places which, within many religious traditions, devotional wandering has historically occurred.Several days into the project, however, the themes of wilderness and devotional wandering took on new depth and urgency while the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and the world began collectively negotiating its way through various spiritual, emotional, and physical deserts of solitude, bewilderment, alienation, and fear.Each of the poems and illustrations included within this collection was written and drawn during the first forty-five days of quarantine. The collection serves as a writer's journal on the deep wilderness and profound time of spiritual formation that humanity entered as the pandemic took hold. Read together, they chart a poetic apogee from joy to grief, exultation to death, desire to love without hope.Poems and illustrations from this collection have also appeared in Chitro Magazine and the anthologySheltering With Poems: Community and Connection During Covid (Bent Paddle Press)

"A glowing and enticing little book! Marvelous stories by a gifted writer whose work I've read with fascination since she was my student more than 50 years ago."-Jonathan Kozol, National Book Award winner and author of Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace."Martha Patterson is an incredibly talented, prolific and imaginative writer with an awe-inspiring range of stories to tell. As a fellow-writer, I am fascinated, and oftentimes even awe-struck, by Martha's ability to create characters who we immediately "get". She then takes us on their journeys... journeys that captivate us throughout the entire ride. Her wit, sensitivity and humanity shine through on every page. There is a certain M. Patterson signature built into each work whether it is a comedy, a drama, a mystery or a farce. I am never disappointed, and I am usually terribly envious of the talent of this astonishing creator."-Donald Loftus, Playwright, Dress Blues and The Wayland Nocturne"Martha Patterson's characters are tender and lonely, her writing is succinct and moving."-Evan Guilford-Blake, Author of the novels Animation and The Bluebird Prince, and the story collection American Blues

Emily Bowles has taken the Virginia Woolf we know and unbound her. The Virginia who walks these pages is edged with mist, a ghost that goes on changing and living in ethereal verse. From mermaids to madness, from blooms to bodies, Bowles traverses the landscape of the delicate and the dark. We should all be so lucky to make such a journey.-Holly Lyn Walrath, author of The Smallest of BonesThe Satisfactory Nothing of Girls is a clever entwining of two women living more than a century apart. Bowles "develops strange affection" for Miss Rachel Vinrace in Virginia Woolf's 1915 book, The Voyage Out. The sheltered life of Rachel, confined to "a ship in the Amazon," is parallel to Bowles' "sheltering in" during COVID19 awaiting a "shipment from Amazon." This collection of word-play poetry compares their "satisfactory and unsatisfactory nothings." Women coming of age/aging, body image, fitting in, how women are treated, and the drain of "shut-in-ess" are revealed within Covid19 confines, linked back to Woolf's book. Bowles muses as Emily Dickinson's reflection meets Nicole Kidman's nose; "Roomsical Women" fold "into the absence of self from life", and "Prismprisons" playfully passes time." Her double entendre, contrasts, and turn of words all make for an interesting read.-Annette Langlois Grunseth, author of Becoming Trans-Parent: One Family's Journey of Gender TransitionEmily Bowles gazes out a lonely Covid window while hearing-and at times becoming-women writers from centuries ago, including Virginia Woolf who said the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time, it expands later. Oh, that she had met Emily's untamed anxiety while shut-in, her 'beginending' when she uses inventive language on a modern mythical, mystical voyage with flowers, nose jobs, and mermaids, where there is not 'a ship on the Amazon' but a 'shipment from Amazon'. Travel the landscape of Emily's wry consciousness-'She flatters him / He flattens her'-as she untangles desire, the ongoing struggle of the collective feminine self knit together by Emily with erudition and wit. Whether 'violence at midlife' or 'violets at midlife', she gets the answer right by writing an answer for all women because 'that's the story of hers most mine'.-Kathryn Gahl, author of The Velocity of Love

Poet Brenda Nicholas believes her regular yoga and meditation practice has healed her anxiety and periodic depression by calming her nerves and keeping her centered and energized, helping her maintain a peaceful outlook in the face of everyday stress. She shares her beautiful and inspiring yoga poetry in her debut collection. If you teach yoga or simply do yoga at home on your own, you may be looking for inspiring words to share with your class or to meditate upon before beginning your practice. Reading yoga poems before or during a yoga class is an excellent way to invite a calm, soothing, reflective mindset. This, in turn, helps relax and prepare the body for the many benefits of deep stretches and asanas in a yoga class.

Kathleen Gregg's debut poetry collection, Underground River of Want, is a frank and unflinching account of devastating loss, bad choices, divorce and growing self-awareness. Be prepared to be heartbroken right along with the teenaged narrator after the sudden death of her father. Emotionally adrift and grief-stricken, the young girl launches a search for love and attention that becomes a destructive pattern in her life. After living through a dysfunctional marriage ending in divorce, the mature narrator picks herself up and faces the future with a new attitude and a strength that she finally realizes has always been there. The reader will cheer her along as life changes for the better; and the kind of love that has eluded her, now enters her life. The poems in this collection are evocative and engaging, lush with imagery, laced with musical references The last poem, Rolling with the Stones, is a joyous summation. Kathleen's poems will draw you in and then take you along on this somewhat biographical journey to self-discovery.

Weeks-Rogers moves between the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the light and the dark. Self-Anointment with Lemons is concerned with the spaces between individuals, both the literal and the metaphorical, but also the spaces individuals explore within themselves. The ritual of coming back to oneself, time and again, to interrogate these spaces comprises the bulk of her concern: we very often turn ourselves inside-out on the road to self-examination. Why not, instead, anoint the self, and pay homage to the process? This collection convinces the reader that such a thing is possible. -Jay Szczepanski, poetry instructor at Flagler CollegeSelf-Anointment with Lemons is an eternal wound in search of healing. A pneuma in mourning and translation. A flor de muerte dressed in "incredible orange." A "spell against what words bloom from decayed ground." A palimpsest of unexpected crossings. An incantation of "silent homage" and "Cardinal feather" inside our beloved throats. An elegy of voices submerged with reassembled bone. Weeks-Rogers writes: "There is no white spell to recover language." But in these pages, our broken hearts mend amidst the backdrop of sun and earth and song. Each segment of yellow and pith against the acidic rind renders the body as open discourse. This book is a ritual inside the liminal space between grief and tenderness. A light made sacred. -Michelle Naka Pierce, author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Fordham University Press)Nearly each poem in this collection enacts the tension of language: its ability to simultaneously present and obliterate. We begin with The Lost, a sign to identify friends who died, and deep keening over lost meanings. Hollow signs interlock with the silent dead. Language "can't put sensations into words / when years of life-force arranged from back / to front now furl front to back again." Yet while language falls short, the poems' expression of language's failure manages to describe, as in to mark out, with polyphony and vivid color, The Lost's presence in everyday life. As Weeks-Rogers writes so beautifully "There's nothing empty in all that penetrating velvet / blue-black, when you gaze long enough." -J'Lyn Chapman, author of To Limn / Lying InKristiane-Weeks Rogers' Self-Anointment with Lemons feels like a scrolling index as narrative to these fractured times, each line popping with the sensual-poems teeming with the pop and hiss of the present. If that sounds in any way formulaic the poems are anything but-ecstatic, soulful, exuberantly ongoing. What's here is what I want from poetry, immediacy so absolute I can't stop tasting and breathing and hearing the world-landscapes luminous with sand and blue water, Our Lady of Guadalupe tattoos and Mariachi music, Envidia and Toloache, Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, language so deep in its bilingual ache we long to burst into flame due to the thrill of mere sound. I couldn't get through a couple poems at a time without wanting a salt-rimmed glass and a trip to a museum so I could stand once again in front of a Barnett Newman painting or to sit myself down for a Tarot reading. How can language so easily be the thing, the place? I love the electricity in these pages, the duende leaping off the page as if each poem were a recipe for immersion in the unapologetic act of living the day. -David Dodd Lee, Author of Orphan, Indiana and Animalities

Whether Margaret Barkley is remembering, reflecting, lamenting or celebrating, the poems in her chapbook, Ribs, express a life acutely observed. "She doesn't mind waiting like a new winter fox with taut muscles at the edge of a rabbit hole." These are poems that tell the truth as she fearlessly investigates the profound predicament of being a fully alive human.-Les Bernstein, AuthorMargaret Barkley's poems are rich in what it means to be human, with specific individuals and elements from the natural world emerging not only as definitive as an artist's rendition, but by her magic, elevated to the universal. Margaret takes every personal experience and puts it into a new perspective in her poetic world. We, her readers, are the richer for it.-Fran Claggett-Holland, Poet, Teacher, Educational Consultant, Author of four books of poems plus, many books on teaching literature and writing, Founder of The Poetry CollectiveMargaret Barkley's poetry, always accessible, ranges from the mundane to the sacred. She does not shrink from truth-even when raw-exploring the predicament of living in a body. Her words startle, driving the reader ever deeper. She is, simply, my favorite poet.-Skye Blaine¿

Naiad Blood, a first collection of poetry by Sarah C. Beckmann, describes the story of a young woman who discovers herself in the sport of rowing-although she grew up near the sea, she falls in love with boats and the water all over again, in a whole new way. Crew not only provides her with an avenue for personal growth, but also alters her outlook on life. Taking creative inspiration from Greek myths and other cultural ideas around womanhood, Naiad Blood acknowledges social norms and issues that women face, and also directly challenges them. These poems embrace change, freedom, and power; they demonstrate that women should be able to engage with masculinized realms-to gain muscle or cut off their hair. And these poems are also an ode to the sport itself, to the magical and spiritual aura that the experience of being in a boat, and being on the water lends.

"Lisbeth Coiman is a dazzling new voice. With tender rage, she excavates what it means to love and grieve a homeland."-Ariel Gore, author of Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells, and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance and F*ck Happiness."Lisbeth Coiman writes 'Before I was born / A pristine future / streamed down from El Ávila tributaries' in the opening of her poem "El Guaire." With these words and beyond, I am also taken to my point in history, the promise that we are all born into without knowing what's to come, and how we are as individuals and as a collective, forced to reckon with a past that we are killing off to chase a promise of a better future. For immigrants, this carries a bigger weight, as we are both killers of self while our selves are so often the victims of a society that wants to kill us. Coiman's collection is a deeply personal work that makes us revisit the guilts and the angers that we carry."-Chiwan Choi, author of The Yellow House"UPRISING/ALZAMIENTO es un libro desgarrador, sincero y nostálgico. Se entremezclan los recuerdos de infancia, el exilio y los retos de la enfermedad mental. Es además un testimonio de vivir y narrar entre lenguas."-Nathalie Bouzaglo, editora de Excesos del Cuerpo, y autora de Ficción Adulterada."Weaving history, current events, and personal narrative, Lisbeth Coiman takes us on a vivid exploration of what it means to rise up, as a Venezuelan both within the country and from afar, as an immigrant in new lands, and as a woman in patriarchal societies. Longing and loss mix with resolve and resilience as Coiman teaches us that uprisings are never simple or painless, but that they can be beautiful and are almost always necessary on the path towards a more just world. Uprisings / Alzamiento is that "despertador en tu mesa de noche // Una campana en tus oídos" ("clock on your beside table // ringing in your ears") we all need right now, waking us up to the urgent need to take action in the face of injustice even when-especially when-we are afraid of what might come next.-Li Yun Alvarado, author of Words or Water"

The Silent Ones, Michael McMahon's sweeping debut, introduces a child dwelling in a garden of shadows that wound and sustain. "The Wish" suggests how he ties his father's sudden death to a grim jingle he mockingly directed at his napping father. The roots of his guilt are established in poems like "Quiet Time" and "Holy Writ" where the scowls of stern nuns in his Catholic grade school become internalized sources of shame. Juxtaposed to this guilt are poems like "Headwaters" and "Picnic at Taughannock" that celebrate blessings bestowed by family.In Part II of The Silent Ones, forces that harm and heal flow into a natural world that mirrors and shapes the personal. "Wilderness" is haunted by dissonant cries of coyotes tearing through boughs of Jeffery pine throughout the night. In "Raptor" the poet cowers from the drumming wings of a red-tailed hawk in attack. Conversely, "Camping by the Klamath" celebrates mule deer osprey and damsel flies at streamside, one of the many poems in Part II that laud the natural world's ability to grant restorative grace.The final section, attempting to resolve these tensions, invokes powers of ancestry. Here the poems depict the loving trust of parents, grandparents, granduncles and aunts who, remembering how it was, forgive him over and over, up to and beyond their graves.

There is abundance in Erica Manto Paulson's premiere poetry collection, Hunger. An abundance of image, of story, of knowledge, of the brimming silence which "all things holy" know is "the only way to get through." At its wise heart, Hunger is a reflection on motherhood, in both its most intimate and communal forms. "Who feeds them?" asks a young daughter about children pulled from their mothers' breasts at this country's border. These poems know the reciprocity of nourishment given and received. And in this exchange, "we are opened, / we close / the world expands again."-Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate EmeritusThis is a book about the hunger for love with which we come into the world, and its imagery takes us on a journey to the deepest reaches of our affection for one another. The poet gives birth to a daughter and dreams "they rummaged / through every drawer of my body / to find her." She remembers how proud her son was when he discovered her nose ring as he suckled, "looking up as if to let me know / it was there." She teaches her children the noun bird for "your red heart / flitting in front of you / on the branches." It may be, as Louise Glück has written, that we see the world only once, in childhood, but the poems of Erica Manto Paulson come about as close as language can take us to a second look. -David Lee Garrison, author of Light in the River (2020) Dos Madres PressIn Hunger, Erica Manto Paulson celebrates a keen appetite for life and love. A mother delights in her own ability to cure with abundant breast milk, a young girl almost smothers her new baby sister with excess kisses, a daughter adds mythic memory to her C-section birth story, and a son marks his growing independence with a vampire cartoon that says "I love you more than all the flowers." These poems yearn in their sweet balance of story, song, and imagination, inviting the reader to "open your mouth wide and it will be filled with good things." This poet's debut chapbook teaches us to name love, need, and loss for each other. You will be hungry for more.-Roberta Schultz, author of Touchstones (2020) Finishing Line Press

Moriah Cohen's poems in this collection, Impossible Bottle, come together in this grand and cool intersection between the blood-pumping heart and the dendrite smashing brain. They live in that space and in this domain, they constantly surprise. These poems are physically and mystically driven. When an ephemeral state and a solid body collide we get lines like, "At the far end of a dream, I slice a part down the center of my hair, sink a guthook into a lamb's sternum." That word 'guthook' is emblematic of all the sweet sharpness in this collection. They remind me of the big band music of Charles Mingus. In particular his tune, "Boogie Stop Shuffle." Her poems do all three-they boogie, and they stop, and they shuffle. There is a music in this collection, Impossible Bottle, that is raw and dirty and tender and sweet. The title tells you immediately. Say it out loud. Sing it. Impossible Bottle. There is nothing out of reach here. Everything is possible.-Matthew Lippman

Artists speak of negative space as an important part of any composition. In 1819, Keats wrote about how "straining against particles of light in the midst of a great darkness...is the very thing in which consists poetry." Poets are thus familiar with the power of the via negativa-the white space surrounding words, the silences between passages, are never empty. Rather, by turns they shimmer and bristle with the enormity of the unsaid. It takes not only skill but also great love and courage to write toward those places where a wound has been inflicted, whether in the aftermath of family tragedy or of the world's larger raft of trauma. In the poems of Tracy Rice Weber, we find a poet gifted with such a generous capacity for tenderness, and one who shows us how the careful carpentry of words not only builds or mends, but also allows even the joints and hasps to sing.-Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts & Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia 2020-22In Tracy Rice Weber's All That Keeps Me, the ordinary is made luminous. Fireflies, sand dunes, daffodils, brown bags and buckshots, all matter of making and unmaking, are turned over in new light. Here, hands are "tools, not ornaments" fit for use and usefulness. They salvage and mourn, for some, they wither. For others, hands become distant memory, like the rest of the worn body, undone. Giving words to the wordless and grace to what's mostly overlooked, Rice Weber's poems herald the gods of all comfort: nameless saints staving off empty cupboards, protecting heirlooms, allowing for grocery store reverie. The poet feels what so many feel when threading the difficult stitch of family: "There/ are fathers and mothers for every/ space left in me." And a child's wonder, when does it turn? What a burden love is, this fear we all collect of losing what we most want to hold. This work is a record and recollection, a timeless desire, to burrow into the minutia of our living, and come back with something to show for it.-Remica Bingham-Risher, author of What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error "In All That Keeps Me, Tracy Rice Weber makes visible 'the gray geometry' of sorrow. Rooted in the restless intimacies of the familial, her poems don't flinch-her clear-eyed language brings us close to the pain and to the tenderness. What wounds also tethers. Rice Weber's poems-beautiful, resonant-will stay with me for a long time."-Eduardo C. Corral, author of GuillotineA stunning chaplet that trills in a space of honest vibration between the feral and the domestic. In soft brilliance, link by link, here is a chain of history that breaks the reader over and again. Every time I return to this manuscript the reservoir of its detail fills an entire world's worth of sound, image, and the infinite minutiae of life that would spear our imaginations. Here are poems that do the hard work of dying. Here are poems that blaze up, afire, with what it is to be human. This is poetry that reaches. All That Keeps Me will seize you with its beauty, unfettered as the wind.-Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, author of D¿mos

Stacie M. Kiner's beautiful, wise, merciful collection Inventory begins with the words of Eavan Boland about "the surface of things," how they "barely hold...what is under them," then deftly, subtly, and keenly mines these real and metaphorical surfaces, and as readers, we are all the richer for it. She does not expound, but rather, asks often heart-stoppingly astute questions of the largest themes of our lives: death and the dead ("where aren't they?"), love ("a small/hard word"), loss, longing, memory, the natural and inevitable world, and how to live in it.-Elisa AlboThere aren't many poets who can do what Stacie M. Kiner does in her chapbook, Inventory. She has that rare ability to write spare, crystalline poems that pack a punch. Moreover, Kiner cuts through excess "fat" with a scalpel. Her poems bleed while they sing. I confess I didn't read these poems, rather, I tumbled through them. It's what happens when you fall in love with her words, her exquisite language.-Lenny DellaRoccaIn these deftly crafted poems, Stacie M. Kiner performs a raw and honest inventory of objects and moments that accrete meaning. However, this work is far from dull and dutiful; with a lively curiosity and a restless desire for life, these poems carry and celebrate all the beautiful and brutal moments that together make a life.-Emma Bolden"When your body/decides it wants/its own words" is a perfect summation of Stacie M. Kiner's poems. They are both visceral and lyrical at the same time, taking you on a trip into her very personal and expansive world. Her words here always seem to be the right words, the words her body wants.-Dr. Barbra Nightingale

"The poet's work to establish agency in the midst of sickness is so clear and hard fought, that one is filled with admiration and wonderment at the ability to carry the reader so deep into her journey with all of its subcurrents."-MARY STEWART HAMMOND, author of Out of Canaan (W.W. Norton, 1991) & Entering History (W.W. Norton, 2016)"These poems interrogate seizure disorder and recovery, its spectrum, the people around it, family, community. In those waters swim a sense of history, distortion, victimhood, the inevitability of scapegoating, in fact, discrimination and racism. The poems themselves seize. Their strongest light is their willingness to inhabit the very "kindling" of the neurons, "the highway clothed in goldenrod." Indeed, as the poet writes in "Blue Electrode," the title poem, "Yes, my mother thinks to herself/ tying her torn scarf,/ the words Epilepsy and Woe/ are synonymous."-RALPH BURNS, author of but not yet (Lynx House Press, 2017) Winner of The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, & Ghost Notes (Oberlin College Press, 2000), Winner of The Field Poetry Prize