Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

This chapbook of poetry is set in a rich Alaskan landscape. Throughout these poems, place, weather, and nature are the vehicle through which family, motherhood, parenting, and marriage are explored. There is a sense of longing and loss, renewal and wonder, that leaves the reader wanting more.

Mid-Bloom is one woman's exploration of grief, illness, and survival as she faces a breast cancer diagnosis. Having lost her mother to cancer two decades prior, author Katie Budris is forced to confront that loss again as her own treatment unearths a deep longing to connect with her late mother. Through a loosely chronological structure, these poems invoke nostalgia through childhood memories and use nature-centered imagery to guide the reader through some of her most difficult experiences. Described by Abbey J. Porter of Mad Poets Society as "accessible poems... with a quiet ferocity," Budris taps into the difficult realities of adulthood and mortality we all must face.

Featuring poems by:Pamela AhlenMary ArderyPhillip BannowskyKaren BerryGary BloomJack C. BuckJeff BurtPamela Hobart CarterAmanda Lin CostaCarol DeeringAnn DeVilbissIris Jamahl DunkleSusan Melinda DunlapSara EddyCeleste EmmonsAndy FogleLaura FoleyChristine GelineauMike GoodAtreyee GuptaLois Marie HarrodKatherine HesterEmily Alta HockadayAlicia HokansonMary Christine Kane

The fourth book of poetry by this New York City poet, Walter Holland's Reconstruction is a work of poetic reconciliation with his boyhood in Lynchburg, Virginia. Weaving both vivid lyric language into these short narrative poems, Holland reconstructs a flawed yet nostalgic past. Uprooted northerners, Holland, his sisters, and his parents sought the bucolic charm and unfettered economic opportunity of 1950s Virginia.But boyhood brought with it a complex emotional and psychological complicity with the perverse cultural mores and institutionalized racism of the south. White, privileged, and sexually conflicted, Holland, who was drawn to the arts, negotiated a world of natural beauty and solitary retreat. His mother struggled with depression. His father, a doctor, kept true to the stoic virtues of fifties masculinity. Middle-class and affluent, Holland went to ballroom lessons, piano lessons, lived in a home attended to by a maid, and grew into a society, on the one hand as an outsider-northern born, Catholic, liberally inclined, studying modern dance and performing in community theater-and on the other felt obliged upon to take a date to her debutante party, attend the cotillions, hunt on one occasion, and obediently comply with the rules of segregation.Holland's poems weave the rural landscape of Virginia and its distinct country local with the burgeoning arrival of suburbanization and corporate industrialization in the late fifties. He gives a sense of the swift transition from the old south to the New South. He layers his poems on top of the brutal remains of the Civil War, the daily evidence of the Jim Crowe south, the rotting foundations of tobacco shacks, segregated neighborhoods, and aged downtown businesses. He describes the prosperity of the sixties, a race riot at his high school, the institutionalization of his mother for shock-treatments, and the travel-hungry father who circles the globe.Above all these are poems that will evoke the beauty of a remembered past and its many illusory and problematic realities.

Held Together with Tape and Glue consists of 17 poems, including erasures and collage. The visual collage of the cover art uses a photo which inspired the first poem in the collection, "Flight Over a Quiet Square."¿

"A tightly-unified series of Biblical portraits, Channeling Matriarchs makes use of archetypes still relevant to present selfhood. A fine first book."-Michael Kriesel, Hearst Award Winner, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Past President"In the patriarchal society of the Bible, chances for a woman to be remembered at all depended largely on the fame of husband, father, brother. Through line, phrase, or sometimes single words, Lynn Aprill subtly reveals the feelings, thoughts, motives of 16 named or nameless women, giving them a life of their own. Thus, Lot's wife looks back to mourn her sodomized daughters; Jael is recognized for her heroic killing of the Israelites' enemy; Dinah hints that her brothers' murder of Shechem, thereby "rescuing" her from his bed, is not at all appreciated. Channeling Matriarchs is a remarkable first-time publication by a very promising poet."-Irene Zimmerman, OSF, Catholic Press Association, 2020 First Place Winner in Poetry Book Category, Greenfield, WI

Do, please, check out the final stanza of "Flutter" for a nutshell demonstration of sound gorgeously orchestrated in language, or look at the sly echo of "things" and "rings" (with its diminuendo in "tightening" a few lines later) in this collection's first poem. But I don't want to imply that This Bony Cabinet is just one long tone poem. Billy the Kid awaits you here, and the architect Louis Sullivan, and the three major icons of twentieth century physics/cosmology, and ¿¿¿ well, maybe the heart of your own bony cabinet is knocking inside these lines too. Enjoy! -Albert Goldbarth, two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle awardThe terrain of the poems in Kim Horner McCoy's This Bony Cabinet includes roadside memorials, architectural monuments, and Interstate mileposts along a lightly-peopled diagonal between Chicago and eastern New Mexico. Birds frozen in sculpture, the shock of world events rattling the order, a way woke coyote tale, F5 tornadoes, weaponized airplanes falling from the sky, coiled rattlesnakes beside the trail-McCoy writes with lithographic remembrance, cataloguing unexpected detours, missing sections of map, and the lingering effects of disasters-both personal and collective-in her journey through early 21st Century America. -George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of KansasKim Horner McCoy writes from her soul. The poems in THIS BONY CABINET reveal an ear for language and a voice all her own. A mesmerizing debut. -Johnny D. Boggs, eight-time Spur Award winner

Humming the Thing is infused with the celebratory as Theresa Hamman takes us to the land of myth and magic. With elements of steampunk style and ethos, and through such innocuous images as worms, curlers, birds, and apples, we find ourselves in an environment some would call austere: a world of "smeared black/lead" and "tear stained buttery paper/with a frowning sun." Humming the Thing, is grounded in the strength that what is invisible and unknown are supported by forces beyond this planet. Hamman puts these to good use as distress calls and as the expression of wonderment. An exciting new collection by one of rural Oregon's experimental voices, Humming the Thing funnels these essentials of survival into lyrical, kaleidoscopic musings, making us want to sing along.-Susan Kay Anderson author of MezzanineThe universal theme of loss, in all its many forms, permeates Hamman's second chapbook of poems, Humming the Thing. Hamman has a unique way of writing about ordinary things, and this is especially so in her poem, 'A Mind Without a Bird.' Many of her poems are personal, such as the wistful 'Urgent Prayer,' when she writes about how 'the weight of years scrawls a marquee across my mother's forehead, bends her back.' One of my favorite poems in this outstanding collection is 'Rural Oregon. Tuesday. In September,' with all its acute sensory observations. Hamman's poignant words strike all the right notes of indelible loss in this noteworthy collection of poems.-Dianne Alvine author of Child's PlayFor years, I have admired Theresa Hamman's unflinching eye and sharp ear for the exactly right turn of phrase in her beautifully honest poetry. She uses the immediate details of daily life-the birth of a new granddaughter, the start of a spring that promises nothing but more cold rain-as an invitation for her reader to delve more deeply into their lives as well, illuminating what John Updike called "the human news," those stories and relationships that can't help but sustain us.-James Crews, Editor of How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude & Hope

refinding the rules of gravity by Anna Antongiorgi is a book full of the magic of young-woman-artist-human moving to New York City energy. The poems reference Taylor Swift, but also Gertrude Stein. They're sparks of comedy alongside heartache, and a healthy dose of nostalgia. In and among all of this, the collection is a story about getting back up: a ballet dancer finally coming back to dancing-happy, spunky, silly, devastating, fabulous dancing. This work speaks to the up, as well as the down, and the sometimes sideways motion of twenty-something confusion, conflict, curiosity, and joy.

In Some Tanka in Thanks to Elroy, Not the Most Cantankerous Dog, Glenn D'Alessio shares his great love of Elroy, his rat terrier who accompanied him on walks, during his travels, and at home. In "To a Dog Person", D'Alessio writes "The thing is, even when wizened/ with age, and jumping in sleep, / he's but a light nudge / away from the present / and all attention / when we are demanding / a little understanding and love." The poems are small gems and encapsulate the relationship between dog and man without judgment, but with complete acceptance of both dog and human behaviors. Oh, that all of us could learn from Elroy and open to the beauty of the world.-Susan Roney-O'Brien, Author of Thira, Earth, Farmwife, Legacy of the Last World, Bone Circle, and 1990 Winner of the Worcester County Poetry Association Poetry Prize, and 2020 Winner of the Stanley Kunitz Medal.Glenn D'Alessio's Some Tanka in Thanks to Elroy, Not the Most Cantankerous Dog is a charming portrait of a beloved companion. Each poem reveals a fetching aspect of Elroy expressed with humor and humility. The blend of Tanka and free verse frame every piece in a complementary form. I grew ever fonder of dog and man with each passing page. Ventured with them transported by D'Alessio's vivid capture of place, his awareness of the role senses play in scenes. The collection's Postscript poignantly portrays the poet and his his pairing with Elroy. It offers peace, an elegy to love.-Richard H. Fox, Author of TIME BOMB, wandering in puzzle boxes, You're my favorite horse, The Complete Uncle Louie Poems, and embracing the burlesque of collateral damage. 2017 Winner of The Frank O'Hara Prize.

"Starting with the first line of the first poem, 'The night that bled into the morning my son died,' I read this collection straight through with my heart in my throat. Reader, prepare yourself: once you start reading What I Should Have Said, you won't be able to stop. After reading these poignant poems, which are full of joy as well as sorrow, I feel that I, too, knew Kyle, and I miss him very much."-Lesléa Newman, author of I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father"What I Should Have Said is a raw and painful chronicle of a bereaved mother's journey through losing her child to the disease of addiction. I've been struggling with the death of our second son, Christopher, and Lanette's words really helped me move forward in my grief. Her brutal honesty allowed me to process Christopher's death from alcohol addiction. I'm encouraged by her "List of Hopes" at the end of the book and have begun writing my own list. I thank the author for shedding light on the darkness and stigma attached to the disease of addiction and for reminding us that our children were and are so much more than their addictions."-Kathy Corrigan, Board President, Bereaved Parents of the USA"If it were fiction, if it did not lacerate the heart to know the truth behind it, Lanette Sweeney's poetry memoir about losing a child to drugs would only be tragically beautiful. As it is, it is devastating, featuring poetry by her lost son Kyle [Fisher-Hertz] along with her own. Speaking the unspeakable for her own peace, and for the understanding of the rest of us, is Sweeney's mission. The only thing better than reading these tender, elegiac, broken words would be for her to never have needed to write them."-Jacquelyn Mitchard, author, The Deep End of the Ocean and 18 other novels

Drawing on the works of Jack Spicer, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jacque Derrida, Donika Kelly, JG Ballard, Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie, Deleuze & Guattari, Philip K. Dick, HP Lovecraft, David Lynch, Andrea Rexilius, numerous pop/rock musicians, film, and surrealist art, A Void and Cloudless Sky creates a landscape of comedy, dream, horror, drama, family, life, and death. From locations as familiar as the dive bar to the technological cyberspace of networks, nodes, and artificial intelligence, a human experience both familiar and strange is laid out for the reader. Crustaceans trade barbs with waitstaff, the essays of Kurt Vonnegut rub against the music of Thom Yorke, random chance collides with intentionality in an organized chaos that is both accessible and dense, highbrow and lowbrow, like "Tom Waits eating flies / in Dracula."A short work with a wide breadth, A Void and Cloudless Sky is a quick read of great depth. It is poetry for rereading.

April J. Asbury's debut poetry collection, Woman with Crows, explores the roles of women from childhood to adulthood. From "Big-Kid Legends" to "The Obituary Phase of Life," Asbury weaves together the voices of myth, folklore, and family story. What emerges is a vibrant tapestry of family, love, and loss. Crystal Wilkinson, author of Birds of Opulence, suggests the poems "delve into mythologies old and new." Mina from Dracula makes an appearance, as do the unnamed sister of Icarus and a certain sleepy, apple-eating princess. Many of the poems explore traditional tasks, such as cleaning, canning, and caregiving, as Rita Quillen, author of Wayland and Some Note You Hold. These are poems of "the complex social contract," Quillen says, "that women sign without knowing it." Keeping the family history, preserving the stories as efficiently as the summer's harvest, Woman with Crows feels the weight of the past while flying toward survival. This is a book "engaged with deeper, more difficult beauties of the world," according to Diane Gilliam, author of Kettlebottom and Dreadful Wind & Rain. "These poems have a wingspan that gathers both light and dark, silence and voice, this side and the other." From this side to the other, Woman with Crows prepares to make journey both familiar and strange . . . But always full of wonder.

Where Things Are, the debut collection of poems by Joan Gibb Engel, oscillates between the present and the remembered-in the poet's own words, "the beloved dead keep company with the living." 'Things' include objects quotidian and eternal-an accumulation of kitchen gadgets and the rich lives of former fishing families; plants, persons, and places that hold eternal meaning but are visible only in remembrance. With stereoscopic vision, the poet chronicles ageing, illness, separation, death, and social change while affirming "beauty, art, and truth among life's wonders." Engel ponders the ruin of ancient cultures: "stories told in moonlight told no more" and the changed nature of cities: "streetwalkers' beat: decanters now." She values the companionship of children as when she and a granddaughter pick blueberries and she celebrates "lifetime memberships" among persons no longer living. The past is both a confessional of "bloodied trap lines" and "the sacred music of our ancestors," while the present is both "dropping like flies" and hearing again "the clear whistle of birds." In the words of poet Randall R. Freisinger, Engel's poems "offer depth of vision at a time when we so badly need it."

A rich testament to the power of creativity and the human spirit, Marrall's debut collection is filled with stark, realistic poems that paint an intimate portrait of love, loss, identity, and the ever-present need for empathy. In these vibrant poems of nature and biography, Marrall showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Overflowing with vivid and accessible language, Relief, Have You A Name? is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, written with clear eyes and an open, curious heart.-John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes AnotherTo be alive is the greatest miracle of all. We are born to grow, to question, to create. And when, in the inevitable moments where life threatens to crush us, it's our relentless desire to breathe that leads us back into the light, alarmed at having been so cruelly surprised. Each piece in this collection from the quiet heart of Phoebe Marrall is like a bright red berry placed in the sun, oxygen that honors the miracle. I highly, highly recommend sitting down and having yourself some Phoebe Marrall red.-Graham Salisbury, author of Under the Blood-Red Sun

How does one navigate guilt, grief, and loss? The poems in Ghost-Mother explore how to remember and to honor a mother as she declines due to illness and eventually dies.

"These poems know a great deal about beauty and violence: 'twenty years / was about as much good as / circling / a black eye'. Kylie Gellatly shows us what vividness is, how it lives in our shapes, our pain, our imaginary (and real) selves: 'man taken / to be a trench / that might have been a cannon ball'. This poetry composes musics with silences. It is both a song and whisper, an erasure and exhalation. It is both a journey across us, and inward: 'the ship was the rib of reason / [...] the ship was beginning to be an alarm / the ship was right there on the floor while this book was written.' Herein history is envious of a dreamscape. And yet: the dream aspires to be dailiness, and fears it. Which is to say: this is a book of fevers the likes of which you feel most familiar with, yet have not seen before. Recognize yourself in them."-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"Musical and deeply felt, these poems-untitled and running wild-chase down the heart. No tangible space is without the immaterial here. The Elements are resilient, and I feel pushed and pulled by them. Gellatly's debut book is beautiful, haunted and mystical. Her poems are like 'the strange contrast between death and dawn,' and 'the fool's divine spark / forever coming loose' in the reader's hands."-Bianca Stone, author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief"In Kylie Gellatly's The Fever Poems, water is silk that rubs against the night. Events are figments of the speaker's imagination and graves shape time. Extremely contemporary in their fixation on illness, isolation, and anxiety, these poems spill down and across the page like slate off a cliffside. There is an unwavering generosity to the introspection of this speaker: through her eyes, floating ash becomes 'hundreds of baled papers, bent up like two bears dancing.' This is a collection that understands and beautifully, painfully relays that what we have-with each other, with the land-is 'the last of the last.'"-Taneum Bambrick , author of Vantage"'I was sore at heart,' writes Kylie Gellatly in The Fever Poems, and the reader is invited into a sprawling, curious, visionary, deeply empathetic, epic debut. Her poems shine goldly in the space between elemental earth-salt, rock, wind, weather-and the human, conscious choice of living. With echoes of Jorie Graham and W. S. Merwin, Gellatly navigates the complexities of language, 'a pledge made / into paper / weathered / in our hands,' 'choked with the monsters of parentheses'. This is a collection for our time of pandemic, uncertainty, and an urgent need for a revision of our relationship with the natural world-Gellatly recognizes the swinging pendulum of power between the earth's force and human interference, and, without castigation, illuminates us."-Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal"Kylie Gellatly's The Fever works like a ship, navigating the tempests of our fragile moment. The poems enact a wandering/wondering through fire and fog, investigating meaning through a naturalist's lens, balancing an elemental pull with the fierce heat of being human. This collection is an invitation to a sensorial meditation, one where fever is less a symptom of sickness than a door to discovery."-Erin Adair-Hodges, author of Let's All Die Happy

The Cathedral Is Burning, Betsy Orient Bernfeld's full-length poetry collection, is a lamentation for the loss of Mothers, Grandmothers and Mother Earth. The poems are illustrated with art and photos. From the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris to the demise of Central American migrants in the Arizona desert, the poetry bounds through fire, drought, demolition and rebirth, viewed through the solace of stained glass. Bernfeld's work was supported through the 2020 Wyoming Arts Councils Creative Writing Fellowship for Poetry.

1. : In Harvest, a poetry chapbook, the speaker takes revenge on the circumstances of her life by being blunt, bare, and brave on the page. She contends with a male-dominated society and abusive childhood as she moves into adulthood and the supposed saving grace of a marriage. The speaker confesses traumatic memories, marital betrayals, and harmful coping mechanisms in a lyrical way, adding her voice to the abused poets of past and present who have also asked themselves - how can a raped daughter grow up to love a man? In an attempt to break the silence forced upon her by an abusive parent, the speaker examines the pattern of sexual failures in her life, as well as her roles as a female, daughter, sister, and wife through poetry. The speaker has excavated her inner child and bared her most intimate parts in poetry. By attempting to exorcize her stepfather to make room for her husband, she found the potential for fierce love in her sibling relationships. In reaching for them, the speaker reaches for herself instead of another man.

When you turn a kaleidoscope, the picture before your eye reinvents itself over and over. Reading these excellent stories by Amy Foster Myer is akin to that. Sadness, joy, bliss, pain, hope, dread, delight: with each turn of the page, Foster Myer reinvents the world.-Evan Morgan WilliamsAmy Foster-Myer's Where We are Going to Next is aptly titled: every story here lives on the edge, always on the fringes of the world, looking in, even in the most intimate relationships. And when each story ends, it ends just before you think it will, not showing us where characters have arrived but hinting at directions they might take. This is a book full of horizons, whales and dragons rimming the unknown edges of the map.-Samuel Snoek-BrownIn eleven concise, perfectly observed stories, Amy Foster-Myer offers intimate meditations on spouses and neighbors, parents and children, love and grief. Where Are We Going to Next gracefully explores the tension between our desire for connection and our fundamental solitude, and illuminates small, seemingly familiar moments of domestic life in all their grand mystery and strangeness.-Emily Chenoweth

My Wolf is a third chapbook, (June Bug 2014) and (Light to Light 2016) by Kate McNairy. "To read My Wolf is to enter the kind of dreamy world that only Kate McNairy can create" writes Jackie Craven, author of Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters ( Brick Road Poetry Press 2018 ). "Colors chatter, a pampered coat discovers it is going to the cleaner, a gem eyed wolf howls beneath the bed. Each poem brings a fresh surprise. Whimsical, mystical, and heartbreaking, My Wolf invites us to laugh at our own mortality.

These brief prose poems function as "meditations in an emergence," though what is coming forth-which is existence, being, all of it-remains ever unfixed, out of reach. The result is not disorientation but a kind of tenderness for the fragmented though often beautiful attempts at knowing, "the way words unvelop on the page." These poems feel right for our time. They evoke the uncertainty and enormity that seems to dwarf us, and the hope that humans are "something other than lost."-Allison Cobb, author of Plastic: An Autobiography These prose poems hopscotch and hover above a playground of swerving soundscapes like flash floods of murmurations over windswept wheat. "Ablaze in a barnstorm." "A television in reverse." "Agogged." Morse's discrete instants of disjunctive astonishment welcome us as friends with these mercurial passages through the whir of words. "Dear slipstream, I'll call you come what may." Dive into the current of onomatopoetic anomalies and you will swim with dolphins cresting, "dreamt afoot. Or afloat."-W. Scott Howard, editor of Denver Quarterly