Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

There is something difficult to address in the poems of Robert Simon's new collection, An Ode To Friendship. Perhaps, it is the purity contained in the flagrantly traditional and formal language that wraps itself from cover to cover. Some might find fault with such a jarring approach, given the 21st Century we find ourselves gasping through of late. I am of the other opinion. When reading Simon's work, I become lost in what one must assume to have been a painfully liquid transition, through a seamless and unspecified period of time. These are poems where technique meets soul; where that very same soul is in a constant struggle with its brother, intellect. Robert Simon sneaks up on us with this, and the result becomes a deliciously subtle agony, recognizing how tears and tears can intersect, causing delight in the midst of despair. -Sam Pereira

Unrequited Love and Other Things of Equal Importance, Alejandro Ruiz del Sol's debut poetry chapbook, explores how a voice can find love for others and self-love in a bent vision of reality. Set in "Florida" among "alligators," this strange collection of poems interrogates Ruiz del Sol's own Latinx life and experiences with poverty.¿

In this first collection by Midwest writer BD Feil, Lifting Myself By My Own Toes, the poems pull from experiences and observations across the Great Lakes, from the cities of Chicago and Cleveland to the rurality of southeast Michigan and of northwest Ohio. Through memory and trial, familial legend and Nature, Feil examines the comfort of place and the discomfort of misplacement. In the first group of poems, "well-meaning strokes," BD Feil muses on the vitality of words and graspings at meaning. In "A Reading" he bemoans at jumping to a taste, a heavy burden akin to lifting "himself by his own toes." The next group of poems, "savages and monsters," alternates between standing inside and outside Nature, not only in the idealized worlds of "Heaven" and "Night" but in the longer poems of "Monster" and "In Which Mrs. Adams Observes And Passes Judgment On The Cottonwood And The Goldfinch" where observation spins into running narrative. In the poems of "red-knuckled apples," Feil likens himself to fruit "left hanging to the end" andf digs into memory, of his own and of his family. In "Visiting" he remembers eavesdropping on stories peopled with "names like Florence and Rhiney and two Edwins." Finally, the last section, "now is the time for the sighing," deals with the quest for place, either in the larger universe or in the intimacy of the mirror as in "Boy and a Button" where a child lays out his likes and dislikes all the while "his little fingers weaving/ exquisite patterns against/ a bright blue sky no one/ but him has ever noticed." Poems in this collection by BD Feil have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes as well as appearing in journals like Poet Lore, Slice Magazine, The Penn Review, New Plains Review, Margie, and Plainsongs.

"Grace Covill-Grennan's hibernation, a hush is a collection that I simultaneously wanted to read through in one sitting, and also take many moments to savor each word and line. With her words, she pulls you into the forest, onto the trail, deep into nature and also into the intimate weavings of her life. Grace Covill-Grennan incorporates playful use of language and beautiful images to paint a world you can viscerally feel. The poems in this book will leave you thirsty for more." -Angie Ebba, poet, essayist, and educator"In this chapbook Grace Covill-Grennan turns and turns over a richly physical awareness of her world and the 'slipping by of finite, unceremonious time.' These poems inhabit with fluency the pleasures of form and language play, an imagination marking its own mapless trails and moments of hard earned clarity." -Ell Nasshahn, author of The Leaving and it's Static Center

"Miriam Moore-Keish writes hopeful young heaviness like she always does, with a kindness for setting and a sternness for structures and institutions. The busyness of thick food, wine, eyeliner, humidity, and the blood of different peoples who cannot stop loving and hating each other consumes these works, and our only guiding light is the narrator's unlikely hope that maybe she can figure it all out. These poems are what the American South can be for some and must become for so many others-alert, tactile, and learning." -Bethany Catlin, Rain Taxi Review of Books"In Cherokee Rose Miriam Moore-Keish writes about the pain of family, the pain of the South, the beauty of family, the beauty of the South, the complexity of family, complexity of the South, and also the beauty, pain, and complexity of faith." -Terra Elan McVoy, author of The Summer of Firsts and Lasts, Pure, and Being Friends with Boys"Moore-Keish captures tastes of biscuits and irony. You'll find the South here." -Cindy Henry McMahon, author of Fresh Water from Old Wells

Most of the poems in BEYOND THAT HILL I GATHER are portraits of women who are notable for their achievements. While this common thread runs throughout the book, there is much variety since the women come from various walks of life-authors, musicians, artists, comedians, activists, suffragists. Each poem captures a different flavor as each individual is unique. A partial list of those who appear in the book are Patty Smith, Amy Schumer, Clarice Lispector, Louise Brooks, Joan Rivers, Cherie Currie, Liz Phair, and Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun.

An often dark and brooding debut, We Give Birth to Light explores love and loss, sickness and death, hope and light. The collection is permeated with Weltschmerz, a sense of melancholy and world-weariness. In poems like "The Poetry of My Final Days," the speaker insists there is "nothing left to be tired of," and, in "The Stain," the speaker realizes not only "what we had lost," but "the / nothing we had gained." In "For a Time," a husband watches his wife die slowly of cancer, while in "We Give Birth to Light," a mother loses a child and a husband. But in the latter poem, the mother does not bemoan the darkness that comes with such loss, knowing that it is necessary if there is going to be light.Born in Nebraska and raised in South Dakota, Carson often alludes to his rural upbringing. In "This is Just How It Is," the speaker's stoic mother raises goats and cuts heads off of chickens, while, in "Unforgiven," a grandfather who "used to love to roam" is imagined "gliding across the plains on a / horse, a lone rider." "Waiting for the Stars to Fall" recalls rural American circa 1950, a time when a kid could buy "Cup-O-Gold" candy at the A&P.Carson, in this collection, nods to his poetic influences. He dedicates "For a Time" to poet Tony Hoagland and "The Poetry of My Final Days" to Donald Hall, and he explicitly references W.S. Merwin and Mark Strand in "The Poetry of My Final Days" and "The Bookish Light," respectively. Poems from this collection have appeared in Eunoia Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Right Hand Pointing, Gyroscope, The Poetry Porch, Oddball Magazine, Dunes Review, BOOG City, Poetry Leaves, Crosswinds, Toho Journal, South Dakota in Poems, Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, Monday Night, and Color:Story.

Double Stroller Dreams by Jesse Curran is a brilliant new chapbook of poems about navigating suburbanite parenthood with sunscreen, snacks, sippy cups, and tantrums surrounded by the burdens of a world in quarantine. Curran's poetry is a witness to new motherhood with its difficulties and delights. -Leah Huete de Maines¿

For Father and Many Other Things by Dr. Matthew Diomede is a poetry selection that reveals his closeness to his Italian-American family and to all of nature. His images of nature like night father and day mother are the archetypes of all people. His book is a tribute to all of life and death and the preciousness of both. This poetry book manuscript was originally recommended by John Ashbery as an Award-Finalist in the Virginia Commonwealth University Contemporary Series.

"Sara Sams' Atom City opens with a caution, "But Think, Are You Authorized to Tell It." In poems of sharp wit and riveting investigation, tell it she does! Aware of the irony of "grow[ing] up happy / in a town that knitted / mushroom clouds," Sams documents government duplicity and the revisionist history of developing the atomic bomb. The volume is punctuated by poems rich in details of her Appalachian roots and a magnificent series about local legend "Prophet John," who foresaw the bomb a century ago. Exploratory poems from the "vast archive of the atoms" are tempered by tender poems of loss and love. This is a bold debut by a major new poet." -Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth"Sara Sams' Atom City shows us what violence and invisible interiority and tenderness is at the core of the American hometown. At the core of the American superpower myth. At the core of American exceptionalism, and uranium, and the atom, itself-which is at the core of everything. When hometown is intertwined with the mushroom cloud, when childhood is entangled with the physicist, Sams teaches us that you can "feel your fibers loosen, too-then fall,/ after standing years, involuntarily, on end." I will never think of the bomb, or America, the same way again, after reading this." -Sarah Vap, author of Viability"Each poem Sara Sams writes is a reckoning with man-made devastation. In her brilliant debut collection, she proves herself to be a poet of immense personal and historical depth as she investigates complicity in one of history's most frightening discoveries: the atomic bomb. The result is a haunting and intimate conversation about language and truth." -Diana Marie Delgado, author of Tracing the Horse, a New York Times Noteworthy Pick

In Spat, Lois Marie Harrod examines-head-on, upside down and sideways-the little fractures that haunt our intimate relationships. Intentional or no, sometimes mysterious in nature, they lead as often to bafflement as repair. "Well, says my therapist friend/the danger comes/when you start talking..." And also to what glues us together, as in. "...a rabbit leaps/between your legs,/and you feel his fur/brush your calves/and I imagine/I feel it too." Harrod is the keenest of observers-smart, wry, empathic and generous. These poems open windows, allowing us to eavesdrop on the bleating heart. -Juditha Dowd, author of Audubon's Sparrow and Mango in Winter.Who but Lois Marie Harrod would name a book Spat? Although the husband neglects to carry his glass to the sink, he remains "the guest of her heart." Whether about doorknobs, language, or the heart, these poems exhibit Harrod's unique combination of passion and humor. -Penelope Scambly Schott, author of On Dufur HillHarrod creates various personas in her new book of poems Spat. Some are contemplative, some nostalgic, some whimsical, all are smart. My favorite is the passive/aggressive narrator who asks, "What is there to fix?" about a marriage that needs much fixing. These poems are full of wit, "I don't know how to define our hide and tweak"...and wisdom, "the danger comes when you start talking." And there is music here, playful and beautiful music, "the rat a tat tattle in the brain," "jammering like a jackhammer." When you read these poems aloud, even your mouth will be happy. -Peter E. Murphy, Founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University

Poetry is a democratic art-probably now more than ever. Ellen Hernandez has collected everyday voices, and in their moments, we will find some of our own. -Matthew Sorrento, Editor-in-chief, Retreats from Oblivion: Journal of NoirCon and Co-editor, Film InternationalThe beauty of art is that it connects us no matter how we're separated-by miles, by years, or by a threat we can't see except in how it changes the world around us. Voices from a Pandemic reminds us that even in isolation, we are not alone, and that even in quarantine we can still be touched by the things that matter most. -Peter Woodworth, contributing author for fiction collections including the Anthology of Dreams, Death Is Not the End, and Gimme Shelter

My Father's Drawer explores the trajectory of the poet's life through childhood turbulence and mature hardship which she navigates with grace and resilience. Mintz's poetry does what we wish all poetry would: make even sadness a source of pleasure, because her words always come alive as she reveals through the magic of language a lamenting that never sounds self-absorbed but simply marks the achievement of wonder as the triumph of the poem.

In the crowded future is welcome company in uncertain times. From them a voice emerges, that of a fellow friend and traveller bending the reader's ear. These are poems for the non-poet and poet alike, offering a glimpse into the crowded future. Gurland is a student of Seamus Heaney and his influence shows. The poems in In the crowded future entice with their short forms and familiar, often conversational, tone. They frequently surprise, are wryly humorous, and leave the reader with more then they came for. They have also been described as deceptively simple. The poems resonate, revealing the extraordinary lurking just below the surface of the seemingly ordinary. David Daniels, former editor of Ploughshares writes: "When I first read these poems, I almost laughed out loud at how good they were-how true and brilliant and natural and honest. And how they could also have gone terribly wrong-but didn't. Time and again, I had the same reaction as I realized that Greer has found her way to a very special achievement. I believe this collection will reach a wide and grateful audience, and I'm honored to count myself among the grateful and to have been a witness to the beginning of an important career." Gurland earned her degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard College in 1991. Lucie Brock-Broido selected her to receive the Academy of American Poets Prize for Harvard College. Gurland attended Harvard Law School graduating in 1994. She then spent time raising a family and eventually advocating for children with special needs. During this journey, she discovered that writing remained an indispensable tool for forging meaning in the small moments that shape our lives, and for recording our humanity especially in times of uncertainty. Writes Michael Blumenthal, former Director of the Creative Writing Department at Harvard, "The quiet wisdom in these poems, their serenity in times of turbulence, can help us return us to the peacefulness we all seek, and so often find it difficult to achieve." In 2017, Gurland won the Baumeister Creative Writing Scholarship from Fairleigh Dickinson University where she went on to earn her MFA in Poetry in 2020. Finishing Line Press published her debut collection It Just So Happens...Poems to Read Aloud in 2018. The volume won national acclaim including Human Relations Indie Book Award Director's Choice Award 2018 Life Experiences Book of the Year. In the crowded future is Gurland's second volume of poetry. Gurland's themes suggest that she is a humanist in every sense of the word. By reading her work, one feels more human, at least more connected to the poet, and in a way that feels intimate, honest and ultimately, important. The crowded future seems brighter because of these poems. Lost human connections these days call for poems that instill the essence of humanity. These poems, like parables, each offer a glimpse into the future when society re-emerges forever changed.

In her exploration of the multiverse theory, Alvarez deals with several griefs created by the loss of two pregnancies, a beloved granduncle, her infant son, and finally her father, in the span of just four years, by constructing multiple alternate realities in which one or more of these people survived. In this process, Alvarez deals frankly and sometimes even starkly with death and its consequences on individuals and families. The book directly addresses the questions that plague many people who grieve: What if I had done this instead of that? Would it have mattered? Is there such a thing as fate?The topic of family and loss is a natural one for Alvarez, whose family emigrated from Cuba after the communist revolution, leaving all that they had ever known and loved behind, counting on the gamble of a better life in the United States. Like many immigrants at the time, they spent four years in Spain, where Alvarez was born, before moving permanently to Miami, Florida, where Alvarez still lives. This part of Alvarez's past informs a string of poems set before the main event of the book, the death of her son. The main string of the book's narrative is memoir; Alvarez suffered a miscarriage in 2016 that she explores briefly in a few poems (all the poems are titled "versions" numbered according to the narrative string they belong to). In 2017, she lost her beloved granduncle, Arturo, a grandfather figure. In 2018 she gave birth at just 27 ¿ weeks to twins, a boy named after her uncle and a girl. Thought it seemed at first as if her "micro preemies" were doing well, Arturo died of sepsis just twenty-six days after being born. She would spend another 66 days in the NICU until her daughter, Sara, was safe enough to bring home. A year later, her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and then died unexpectedly of a heart attack. This real timeline is woven into alternate timelines where some of these people survived or never existed, begging the questions, What if? and Why?The poems are written in narrative style, bypassing the opportunity for pathos such a storyline might involve. Alvarez's language is sure-footed and unflinching, not unwilling to delve into the darkest parts of memory and desire. The narrative strains are woven in such a way as to have the poems speak to one another instead of following chronology, yet the reader could tease each narrative string out of the braid using the poems' titles, providing two ways to read the book. Whichever way the book is read, however, it reinforces the themes of the importance of family, the longing for reconciliation, and the questioning of faith. The book's darkness is tempered by its never-ending supply of hope, in the form of the alternative narratives each of which is a version of the poet's life untainted by fear and loss.

With brevity and sensitivity, these daily haiku carry us through an unfolding tragedy, all the more delicately for their economy of words, and all the more effectively for their precision of image and feeling. -Br. Paul Quenon, OCSO, author of Unquiet Vigil: New and Selected Poems and In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk's MemoirWith truly remarkable and arresting haiku, Waldrop leads us through the tumult of the early months of our global health crisis with sensitivity and insight. Her valuable and succinct introduction explains how the poems grew out of her Lenten discipline for the season. The work itself captures the foreboding of the siege of Covid-19, while effectively delineating the little details of a spring both natural and unnatural. A most unique daybook, it offers comfort and hope much as does the Christian ethos, never denying death but always averring new life and rebirth. Or, as one of the finest pieces in this collection says, she gives us "prayers for peace and a path / through new wilderness." We need such paths more than ever and for Waldrop's pointing a way we should all be grateful. -Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and author of Woman in Red Anorak, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, Lynx House PressThe world is still so/ beautiful writes Jayne Moore Waldrop in her enthralling new collection Pandemic Lent, A Season in Poems. Her petite entries, all but a few, offered as various forms of haiku, encapsulate the experiences and fears of so many of us during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and represent her promise of faith-to write daily. This collection will stand the test of time as a well-turned reminder of human resilience. -Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, Author of A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen

This book is the result of my meeting Virginia Brautigan Aste and sitting down and interviewing her over the course of six years. Our conversations continued as we built a friendship at our teaching jobs at a small school in Pahoa, Hawaii and by meeting for breakfast at the local cafe. What is in this book are essays, photographs, and Virginia's story. Her narrative highlights her years growing up in California and then her adventures before, during, and after being married to Richard Brautigan. Widowhood did not stop her from pursuing her own dreams and direction and we see how her survival became her life path in ways which added to the lives of others. I met Virginia in 2008 when I changed high schools and began teaching at Pahoa High, after five years at Keaau High, on Hawaii's Big Island. She was a substitute teacher at the school and I asked her to be my sub/got into a conversation with her and she loaned me her copy of her daughter, Ianthe's, book, You Can't Catch Death. She said she noticed that I had "some good books" in my classroom (they were donations I got from a free box at my last job--from New Directions). She also said that she had been married to Richard Brautigan. I was so shocked, I didn't believe her--that's why she loaned me her daughter's book and of course I was instantly humbled and ashamed that I was skeptical about what she said. (Pahoa is very rural, isolated, and poor). I asked her if I could interview her about Richard Brautigan. She agreed and after these interviews were finished (published in Arthur magazine online https://arthurmag.com/2009/12/25/virginia-aste/ and also in Beat Scene #62, 2010, "Oaxaca") I thought that her story was interesting and[SKA1] also another way to understand/appreciate his writing, so I continued the project of interviewing her and then writing up my notes and recordings. I read his books growing up and also heard him read from Tokyo Montana Express in Eugene when I was starting my undergrad studies there. We had lived in Missoula, Montana and Polson, Montana. Eugene was our second home, too, because of weekends spent at an artsy café building called Fifth Street Market. This became Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast. It contains photographs, linoleum cut prints I made, Virginia's narrative, my essays, and samples of Virginia's research papers she wrote in college when she returned to study at age 50. I taught in Pahoa until 2015 when we moved back to the mainland, to Eugene, Oregon. Virginia was my main substitute teacher and we stayed with her when we evacuated due to a hurricane in 2014--followed two weeks later by lava encroachment into town--so we missed the huge eruption in 2018 which overran our old neighborhood. I now live in Sutherlin and care for my parents. Virginia and I presented sections of Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast at the Oregon Poetry Society's Fall 2019 conference in Salem, Oregon. --Susan Kay Anderson

"To be becoming. Then to be." That is the dreamed-for passage of the poet-from "waiting for word" to delivering it, through the time and space of memory, into "unshadowed" light. In his cohesive collection of poems Waiting for Word, A. Jay Adler explores the terrain of creation, where age and loss and distance from "the wildness of [youthful] dreams" necessarily re-centers the poet's attention on the thing still to be done and what it means. Adler's is a terrain made rough with fear of repetition and blank-page silence yet till-able with the re-assertion of voice when least expected, when "some smith of hidden craft" dares "crack a word against an empty instant" and "word the world" so that his "great and meager / presents Shine". In beautifully sustained metaphors of a writing life, Adler shows us "not the thing, / but the making out of it"-the "inconceivable conception" of art. -Maureen Doallas, author, Neruda's MemoirsThe word yearning comes to mind when reading A. Jay Adler's delectable collection of poems, Waiting for Word. Whether it's the first poem that births the collection-"...so Hold me Hear / me not Cry in silence... With these great and meager presents Shine"-or the final stanza of the final poem's observation about "the slow sudden passage of things / that never were yours, nor time nor space," we are invited to at once check our yearning and revel in it. Hints of modernist liminality take us through the collection, with the simultaneously tragic and cosmically silly meditation of "If I Were You," on never fully being able to know what it is to be someone else, to the subjectivity of the poem "Infinite Nocturne," which journeys through familial connectedness and ends on a cliff: "... the stars: how they are the same stars: which lives: / in the night: in the deep: endless loop: music from: hearts of." This lover of words, epitomized in the Joycean wordplay in "The Words," reassures us that to live is to yearn. If desire is the root of human suffering, in Adler's hands we discover that our suffering is not in vain. -Carol Rial, writer and professor of EnglishJay Adler's Waiting for Word is a confident, sure-footed collection rooted deeply in the love of language, and where it can take us. Though its heart lies in New York-"the city, a time, our young lives on fire" ("Full Flush")-it ranges through Latin America, and upward into a planetary scope. At times Adler's poems move as a "mill-winding motion / foot-flapped propulsion / over the calm plane provide / sheer glide" ("Backstroke") and elsewhere "measuring the progress / of Venus against the millipede's march" ("Myth"). Adler spans the timeline of memory, an earned, wistful intimacy with the twentieth century's passing that also acknowledges its weights-of brutal colonialism, great philosophers, and the struggle of our fore-bearers. These poems gather up high and low thoughts, delivered richly with music, and ever conscious of their transience, for "we cannot know the end of what we do, / though what we do will end." ("Impolitic Manifesto") Here is a book to learn from, rich with subtle meaning, ready to challenge and impress. -Robert Peake, author, Cyclone, The Knowledge, and The Silence Teacher

still is a poetic memoir on becoming, a collection of prose poetry and ink illustration that accounts for the big things (canyons and heartbreak and identity) and small things (holding hands in a taxi, cobwebs, thumbnails) of growing up. at its heart, ruzicano's premiere full length collection is a study of love-requited and not, for self and for others, as the intangible unifier that links us all in its mystery-and what any of us do about it.

These poems invite us in to the spaces between things, into "...a pause of breath/ between the known/ and the next...between the lake/and the coral clouds/of morning..." They invite us to let go for a time of the words inside of us and to just make a space, to experience liminal places of possibilities without ever being pushed across any particular threshold. Cooper invites us to make a space, to let our bodies fill with a million stars, to linger the way "...green lingers/in the trees..." and to notice how "....the old poems/make a beautiful fire..." These are the kinds of poems that can keep a person warm and you might say human, "...you might say/shimmering..." -Ellie Schoenfeld, Author of The Dark Honey, Former Duluth Poet

In West of East, veteran journalist Stephen J. Lyons takes readers on a journey into America's western interior, a tableau chockfull of one-of-a-kind, rough-around-the-edges characters and scenes rarely experienced by the everyday traveler. Lyons himself is at the center of these landscapes, chronicling not only his own past as migrant worker, but also expertly and sensitively observing the men and women who inhabit these precious spaces.

In Feral Ornamentals, Charlie Green takes the particles and atoms that are our lives, reads them inside out and gives us beauty that says we are here and that every breath is art, whether we are grieving, loving, at war, or simply watching the snow fall and boiling eggs. "You can't live in the past, but still you can die there"-read this gift in the present so that we do not die in the past.-Mukoma Wa Ngugi Who knows what? What do they know? And do they know what they do not know? Charlie Green's Feral Ornamentals incites my epistemological curiosity. This new book offers dynamite lines, such as 'We had mixed feelings about discovering / new sins' and 'Regret the error, then forget it.' I love the company these poems keep: fragment, epigraph, epiphany.-Jillian Weise

Reading Debbie Collins' debut, he says i'm fierce, is like passing a car wreck; it's hard to turn away. Her characters are struggling, if not completely broken. It rings true with both autobiographical and speculative emotions, and readers are bound to find fragments of their own humanity within.

I, Menagerie, a debut collection of free and formal verse, takes readers on safari through the jungles of family and the Big Top of memory. Across twenty plus poems, author Garrett Ray Harriman releases animals of all stripes into reflections on those chimeras that define our lives: nature, nurture, and the inseverable bonds between them. "Snake in the Grass," a semi-finalist in Naugatuck River Review's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest (guest judged by Lauren K. Alleyne), begins this diverse animal-gamation. The proceeding zoo illuminates the author's family relationships and the lives and personalities of his parents and siblings. From heartwarming creatures (dogs, lambs, and deer), to those more exotic (elephants and wolverines), to those only seen in imagination (Nessie and Bigfoot), their metaphoric presence preserves his subjects' inconstant inner-natures. Complementing and corralling this varied circus is an array of formal forms, including the sonnet, rondeau, and pantoum. Nature herself is also celebrated through the distilled and subtle lines of the endangered Japanese tanka, while her fickleness, beauty, and cunning (ours, too) define the chapbook's tentpole piece "Vulnerable Species." The collection ends with a song of praise dedicated to an immortal, ever-evolving fixture at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science: a saber-toothed cat sculpture beloved by generations. Poignant, surprising, and utterly untamable, I, Menagerie offers poetry readers a unique exploration of all the wilds and comforts a family can provide.

Go Here, See Elsewhere is a collection of poems inspired by The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a compendium of imaginary places found in literature. The poems in this collection re-imagine these places and inhabit imaginary characters in order to re-envision our own contemporary struggles. Featured in the poems are a range of fantasy, science-fiction, and real-life characters from the beloved Babar the Elephant to the Brontë family.