Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

*Winner of the Mark Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award*"I can barely remember / how we all used to touch each other," writes Chana Kraus-Friedberg in Grammars of Hope. These poems confront issues of isolation and connection heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, and they confront complications and inequities that preceded the pandemic. Here is a writer reckoning with what it meant to grow up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, and here is a writer addressing independence. Hope and lament are braided in this collection, as they are in life. These poems are real, fueled by longing, honesty, frustration, and celebration. They speak across many chasms, and they guide us over and through what divides us. They remind us that we can "grieve for / a life and a certainty / I'd never want back." As in the poem "First Step," Chana Kraus-Friedberg has found a language of hope in this first book "after years of playing God / like a slot machine." These poems matter. They address what we inherit, but they also address what we can build. -Cindy Hunter Morgan, Author of Harborless, 2018 Michigan Notable Book and Winner, 2017 Moveen Prize in PoetryIn Grammars of Hope, Chana Kraus-Friedberg poignantly charts an escape from the atomizing and constricting permissions of a Jewish background in Brooklyn toward an alternate New York City, one where Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovitz can love "not quite silently," where there are new tribes that talk about words, long-haired men and sweaty poets, tribes with "bright, spiky mohawks." She does not find this new city at first, but Kraus-Friedberg in poem after poem bristles with a lyric intensity and drive that achieves this fuller self, that "perfect sentence" as she says in one poem, "words strung together like small shining orbs." She is wise enough at book's end to know why the words are there and hopes that we, in this often polarizing pandemic "wild" world can hear them-and hear them we do-line by line-in this smart and award winning collection. -Dennis Hinrichsen, Poet Laureate Emeritus of the Greater Lansing Area and author of This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go

Set against the backdrop of the poet's new home in the Pacific Northwest, Suppose the room just got brighter provides a snapshot of the beginning and endings of two relationships, and how the meaning of these relationships cannot be disentangled from the unfamiliar landscape she inhabits.

The Second Perfect Number, a chapbook of twenty-eight poems (written one per day of a recent February), reads as a journal in couplet form. Solfrian, an award-winning poet who has authored two previous full-length collections, follows the mind of a woman as she goes through a month's worth of parenting, sex, menstruation, and even a death. The poems, loosely based on the ghazal form, explore how those demands intersect and fight each other for some sort of cohesion. It attempts this cohesion through acts of the intellect, while simultaneously criticizing that impulse for its failure in the face of commonplace divinity. The chapbook quests for some sort of "second perfection": not the original plan of controlling entropy with the intellect, but the second plan of succumbing to a more native, spiritual state of feeling.

Poems for the hopeless romantic to thumb through when their car breaks down in the rain on a lonely gravel road.****************Where else-but in Ryan Scariano's Not Your Happy Dance-might we find an irresistible love poem about a sweetheart canning dill pickles? Where else might another beguiling poem praise that same woman by feting her delight-dance, her "goofy little rumpus?" In the infectious music of Scariano's poems, a lilac has "loamy eyes"; sugar ants are "little seasonal keystrokes"; and vinegar can "inhale summer's glow / and exhale that long amber breath." Wending through this collection, each reader can be the lucky traveler who makes the claim that "Muse Road snuck up / out of the fog / and kissed me." -Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate EmeritaWhat I have always loved about Ryan Scariano's work is its direct engagement with joy. Despite what the title of this zing-ful collection suggests, these are poems that break, like a rainbow might, through a spectrum of emotion grounded in pleasure, in awe, in wonder. After I read this book I sat back and felt held by the nouns of the world, real and imagined, seen and unseen. This is a poet who knows how to live into language and by doing so, he invites us to experience the splendor of fully being. -Emily Kendal Frey, author of The Grief Performance and Sorrow ArrowRyan Scariano's poems are filled with the kind of deep attention that makes the reader long to be its object-to be a "starry green shard of sea glass," a "moth fluttering in the small white breeze," or "the wounded heart on blackbird's sleeve." It's entirely possible to be seduced by a voice on a page. That's what happened to me six years ago when I read Ryan's first book, Smithereens, and I've been waiting for this book ever since. -Henrietta Goodman, author of All That Held Us and Take What You Want

A Vietnam vet crafts a flute from bamboo to redeem the past. An executive drives his mother's ashes to the Gulf. A woman paddles away from her daughter's graduation party on Lake Martin. A musician finishes writing his song during a tornado. A psychiatrist is struck by lightning. Red Mountain Cut tells the stories of ordinary people making remarkable discoveries about themselves and the world around them.

"I am stunned by these poems. Joanne is fearless in carving out a place where, as a woman, she was told she didn't belong, where she worked building and maintaining substation equipment, climbing in towers, handling high voltage cable, and where she saw the spot a wireman had died when he went to work by mistake on a live breaker. A number of poets have tried to define what work is, but few have succeeded as well as Joanne Ward in not only creating a world that tastes of blood but in conquering it." -Thomas Brush, author of Last Night, winner of the 2011 Blue Lynx Prize, Open Heart, and God's Laughter, with Lynx House Press.In these poems, Joanne Ward documents her life as a "high-voltage" woman who spent a barrier-breaking career in the electrical trade at Seattle City Light. With humor and linguistic precision, she traces how she and other pioneering journey women gained their foothold, literally and figuratively, in this heretofore male and largely white electrical trade of Seattle's publicly owned utility. Ward vividly recounts her efforts to succeed, in the face of life-threatening sexism on the job, and to "prove I was good enough to do 'a man's job.'" We sense her satisfaction and even love of this work, as she and her sister electrical helpers "turn to callous and leather / and move like our well-oiled tools..." learn that "our muscles will hold." I wish I had known of Joanne Ward's work, both as high-voltage electrician and poet, when Raising Lilly Ledbetter was being put together-one of these poems would have been included! Brava to this poetic debut by a ground-breaking woman in a challenging workspace! -Carolyne Wright, author of This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems, and lead editor of Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace

This collection of poems is like a New York apartment across the air shaft that leaves its kitchen blinds open, and we observe a daily saga of survival and meals and meaningful comings and goings, the residents unaware of our avid attention. We'll never meet them, but out of the eight million, they're close personal friends. -Garrison Keillor, editor of The Writer's Almanac, creator of A Prairie Home Companion, poetry editor, and author of numerous books including the Lake Wobegon seriesIn the poems of Toast Anita S. Pulier reminds us again and again of what we are drawn to in this world-its idiosyncratic pleasures and deep loves. Her wry, smart poems celebrate the music of what happens in the critical now, her voice easily encompassing two coasts. At the same time, they show us, with a devastating clarity, sometimes forgiving, sometimes dryly funny, the cost of opening ourselves to all of life. Wide, wise, sly, sexy, quiet, heartbreaking- her poems give us wisdom without clichés or heavy handedness. Anita is a grounded writer, a sane poet, who "out of the corner of her eye keeps/ vigilant watch on the ravenous tiger circling/ everyone she has ever loved" (Mea Culpa). At this time especially, we need her words. -Mary Kay Rummel, former Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA, author of What's Left is the Singing, Love in the End,The Illuminations, Green Journey, Red Bird, The Long Journey into North, This Body She's Entered, The Lifeline Trembles, and Cypher GardenMaking sense of it all, especially in our time of crisis, is the theme of Anita S. Pulier's new book, Toast. The intimate vignettes presented are filled with humor, concern and love. She looks to redefine family and even tries to make a deal with the god she doesn't believe in. Ms. Pulier addresses the everyday with a keen eye and reflects back on family, teachers and friends who formed her. And, of course, she googles dementia and offers advice. In many ways this book brings us home and welcomes us all to our lives with a smile. -Phil Taggart, former Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA, author of Rick Sings, Opium Wars and Cowboy Collages. Co-editor of Spillway a Poetry Magazine

Imitation Crab examines the ever-blurring boundary between the genuine and the fake in the 21st century, where reality TV shows are scripted and memoirs sometimes turn out to be completely made up. This confusion bleeds beyond pop culture into our everyday lives, where it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate performance from authentic experience. Truth is a slippery concept; as the title poem suggests, "the truth is what we make/ from the mess we inherit" and might be as phony as Monopoly money or a cheap replica in a museum gift shop.In this virtuosic debut, Vagnino deftly crafts poems in a variety of traditional forms, but gives them a contemporary edge through her use of idiomatic language and wry humor. For example, "Junk Mail Ghazal" is a ghazal (a Persian form) comprised of spam email subject lines. Thematically, the book pays particular attention to the roles women play, and how the societal constructs of gender can be damaging. Vagnino focuses on the consequences women face when they transgress from the identities and labels they have been prescribed (i.e. mother, wife, daughter). These transgressions include sexual desire, aging ("Women at Forty" is a sly response to Donald Justice's "Men at Forty") and ambivalence toward marriage and motherhood.For a poet invested in witty interrogations of artifice, Vagnino surprises with observations on love and loss that are tender, sincere, and funny. "How to Explain Death to Your Daughter" imagines how a parent might explain the unexplainable to a child by telling her that "death is necessary, as natural/ as sugar dissolving in a glass of lemonade/ leaving its essence to linger." The poem was featured on public transit in the Twin Cities as one of the winning selections from the Saint Paul Almanac's Impressions contest in 2017. In "Vera vs. the Butterflies," Vladimir Nabokov's widow, Vera, struggles after his death to determine what to do with the butterflies they collected together. She ultimately decides to kill them, mercifully, so they can be reunited with her husband whom she thinks will be delighted "at the sudden flutter/ of company."Butterflies are just one of many small creatures ennobled in Vagnino's verse-oysters, weasels, fireflies, and countless other bugs and birds inhabit these poems. Vagnino grew up in Missouri, attended school on the East Coast, and now lives in Minnesota, and all three regions are colorfully brought to life in Imitation Crab, which takes the reader from the freak show at Coney Island, to the swamps of Oxford, Mississippi, to the Northwoods underbrush. Vagnino is not afraid to get a little weird; in some of these poems, banality shifts abruptly into absurdity and strangeness erupts unexpectedly, as in the realm of dreams. Dreams are the passageway between the real and the surreal, which she explores in poems like "Your Dreams Explained," where flying is "a sign of a lover's betrayal/ you are gravity, abandoned." Dreams and art imitate life, and likewise Imitation Crab considers how the stories we tell about ourselves often exist somewhere in between truth and fiction. In the refrain of "Imitation Crab," Vagnino ponders the futility of learning to "spot a fake," and in the final couplet, seems to suggest that it's a pointless endeavor: "With practice you can tell the real from the fake/ but unless you're the crab, what difference does it make?" However, by the end of the book, it's clear that it makes a tremendous difference-for the crab and for the rest of us striving to live as authentically as we can.

CATCH A GLOW, is both reverent and a reckoning. Iglesias moves through raw narratives with the strength, grace and focus of a dancer: combining moves, challenging rhythms, guiding each poem beyond routine and into the open bliss of abandon, the way truth-telling tends to feel. -Dasha Kelly, Wisconsin Poet LaureateKarl Michael Iglesias invents a new grammar in CATCH A GLOW. Finding the official language used to describe Hurricane Maria lacking, Iglesias has electrified the language in his book by stacking verbs, breaking lines in the middle of sentences, and using caesuras to alter logic. Iglesias has given us a book of poems up to the challenge of holding our grief and rage. -José Olivarez, CITIZEN ILLEGALCATCH A GLOW is a beautiful collage of fragments that create a new Boricua diaspora, in a post-Hurricane Maria world. With his use of staccato phrases and rhythmic language, Iglesias reenacts on the page, both the splintering and mending of a people and nation. This is an important and much-needed collection. -Mayda Del Valle, A SOUTH SIDE GIRL'S GUIDE TO LOVE & SEXAs if a storm blew through, the poems in CATCH A GLOW are left wind-sharpened and rain-beaten, fragments sometimes whittled into blades, other times the edges are smooth as music drifting from yard to window. These poems sing their jagged love songs for the people and land of Puerto Rico brilliantly, illuminating for me bright lessons on intimacy, justice, and survival. Karl Michael Iglesias takes up this book's broken, mosaic style and does his people right. Like money or parcel packed heavy with supplies to get the living done, these poems soar their way to the island and our hearts with their urgent, skillful care. -Danez Smith, HOMIEIf hurricane poetry was a genre, Karl Michael Iglesias would be at the vanguard of its practice. CATCH A GLOW is a book that comes at you from the outset. The fragmented diaspora is alive in Iglesias's concision. His witness is biting in its undecorated minimalism. We are literally left to deal with the white spaces between the wreckage depicted in these poems. CATCH A GLOW is made of items, memories, and people who survived the longest blackout in history to take jibaro baths and who were left to count the names after the destruction. You can find that which is spoken, whispered, and buried in Iglesias' book. No need to answer when they ask "Were you affected by Hurricane Maria?" Just give them this book." -Willie Perdomo, THE CRAZY BUNCH

I love the fluidity of memory and identity in Still Looking for Neuzil because both are pungent with terror and love. Time is against the speaker because he is against himself as movingly as the speakers in the best dark Coleridge poems. The veteran de-creates the world and the self in an attempt, however desperate, to make peace with "Being Back in the World." In Fredson's poems this hopeful and disheartening mantra burns far into the 21st Century. Still Looking for Neuzil should receive the fanfare of a book like Catch 22 if "Americans in the 21st Century still have the capacity to feel. I consider the terse, obsessive quality of this book, and, though it is not fashionable to quote Arthur Rimbaud, I will: Fredson's book fulfills Rimbaud's exhortation that a visionary must sustain "a long, boundless, systematized disorganization of the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness." -Rich Lyons , Author of Un Poco LocoThis is a book about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Mike offers us a powerful voice that at once becomes poetry as therapy. He takes us into the horrors of the Vietnam War and its lifelong psychological cost to him through a direct and deeply personal exploration of war trauma. He doesn't speak about his PTSD; he speaks from it. This book is a gift to all soldiers who live in the dissonance between war and civilian life, as well as the psychotherapists who work with them. -Angelina Renes, PsychotherapistIf war poetry, or, more specifically, the poetry of soldiering, has focused on experiences within war-its moments of no return, of being at peak intensity or in the contrasting troughs of waiting, of intgrospection-then Fredson's poems aim at something else: the life sentence of veteran-ship. Still Looking for Neuzil is a longitudinal reckoning with the fifty years since Fredson's service in the Vietnam-American War. The war continues to kill well beyond any theater of combat. Ghosts crowd out family. The instinct to disguise oneself as human, day in and day out, after such utter de-humanization, is obscene. The war wears through, always, eventually. The speaker's life is overwhelmed by his service timed and by the war, even as the war is forgotten or revised in our national and popular memory. Still Looking for Neuzil is crucial reading in a country now permanently at war. -Sarah Vap, author of Winter: Effulgences and Devotions

Burntwater is a book with an emotional core, grounded in craft. It doesn't need pyrotechnics of circumstance or political provocation. The collection speaks directly from Diné experience, addressing, among other subjects, the legacies of Spanish colonialism-a complex topic often overlooked, as dominant culture tends to reduce all Others, including indigenous people, to "People of Color." Additionally, the collection speaks to issues of indigenous masculinity in a way that is more accessible, and more confessional, than we as readers tend to encounter. This is necessary, as so much of this perspective has been relegated to prose forms. In many ways, Brossy re-appropriates one of indigenous people's most long-lived means of communication (the song, the poem) in a way that is vital and compelling. This poet serves his poems, not the self, and not at the expense of the reader. "Every person's pain is their own," after all, and this collection moves pain into a legible register, without spectacle, and without a dependence on an imaginary, white readership. -Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of Milk Black CarbonChee Brossy's Burntwater inhabits a present that is sometimes haunted, sometimes uplifted, and always informed by the past. In the title poem, Brossy presents an intensely personal account of the pain and uncertainty of the Navajo Long Walk, a history sounded here from deep inside the people and the language. And Burntwater is a book concerned with language: "Shilíí' hazlíí'-my horse has appeared, has come into being," he writes, trying to bring across the nuances of Diné Bizaad. Other times he challenges English to be more responsive to experience: "mountains bursting highway heaving up neighbors waving in the sun." Or in these beautiful lines in which tenses and seasons crack open to give us a glimpse of how time can surprise and change us: "but for us it was empty and January then, the last snowfall not yet melted when we drove through on our way, though we didn't know it yet, to the house at Long Cornfield." With Burntwater, Chee Brossy enters and enriches the great tradition of Diné poets. -Jon Davis, author of An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat

In The Empty Chair, James Miller Robinson writes a poetry of character and of place, and, without seeming to try, he achieves a wisdom poetry. Whether he is focused on the ruin of a textile mill in Alabama, the young Everette Maddox, or a café in Mexico, his gift is to take exacting measure with a language that is at once alert to the present and ghosted by history, and he does without pretension. Robinson does not cheat, and he does not dodge the ugly or the beautiful. These are poems that matter.-Rodney Jones

Remember Polaroid photographs? Moments of time captured in a single picture, developed in minutes, as long as you don't shake the picture too hard and too fast. Many times in the past several years, Emily Vieweg's poems have earned comments like, "a photograph in words," and "a polaroid on the page." Frequently encouraging embracing the art in the everyday, Vieweg's but the flames explores the beauty of the mundane, the extraordinary of the ordinary, and finding inspiration through music, art, everyday activities, and both the ugliness and wonder of the human condition.Vieweg's poems in but the flames dance between the reality of mental health issues in "BiPolar Is," "Say Hello, Social Anxiety," "An open letter to my depression," and "Everything About This is Wrong." The bravery in telling-it-like-it-is and finding the humor in the irritating brings another awareness to surviving mental illness and sharing the experience in a way that is accessible to any reader.Woven between the anxiety and fear of living with mental illness are moments of relief, calm, levity and memories of innocent youth. Memories like "Jungle Gym" and "The First Friday in June" remind us to remember pleasant moments when engulfed in pain and anxiety. This collection of poems transports a reader through Vieweg's reality: trepidation, calm, fear, levity, yearning, loss, grief, anger, laughter, peace, and bravery. A wise person once made a statement akin to "one cannot be brave without fear." Vieweg is not fearless in this collection, she is brave. She is raw and she is real. She fears how the readers of the world will react to her view of our world and puts it out there anyway, in everyday language, so anyone may experience the beauty of the mundane."My goal, as an artist and as a poet, is to make what I see in the world available to other people."

From the diagnosis of a son's mitochondrial disease to the physical and emotional challenges of caregiving, Pilipino-American poet Brian Ascalon Roley taps into the personal experience of parenting a wheelchair user son and combines it with Philippine horror mythology to create harrowing narratives of a family set in California. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, award-winning author and publisher says, "Ambuscade by Brian Ascalon Roley transports you into the painful world of a father coping with a son's disability. It is a lament, a rage, and at the same time a love story between a father and his son. This is a wringing read."

"Born of "Roman blood and forged in Celtic fire," Everything Is Something Else is poetry as memoir as it seeks to explore key aspects of identity: the Italia, the Irish, and the Queer. This passionate and provocative collection spans 30 years and is a selection of new, unpublished, and previously published poems from the author's acclaimed 2009 chapbook, Supplications.The poet is a stor-teller, no doubt, with an impeccable ability to weave lyrical recollections with bold -and at times- cutting images. The book is divided into three sections -Irish, Italian, and Queer but memory is the connective tissue through this sprawling collection that reveals much about our human need for story-telling and self-reflection as much as our burning desire spiritually, intellectually, sexually, and emotionally for connection.D'Alessandro pays tribute to a variety of influences and forces in his life and poets he admires: "There Is Time Here" is a stirring nod to Jamaal May's "There Are Birds Here"; "Out Of Place" shares the title of the novel by Italian American and D'Alessandro's mento Joseph Papaleo; "The Sandbox, after the classic Edward Albee play -another of the D'Alessandro's mentors, is an ode to a dying parent; and the powerful "Mind Yerself" which is offered in thanks to the late Ciaran Carson and tells a woman's immigrant story while informing the reader that Mind Yerself is Irish for "I love you." Finally, the shortest poem in the collection. "Seeing Her Smile, Sometimes Never" gives a colorful nod to E. E. Cummings. As scholar and author, Pamela Rader wrote: "Franco D'Alessandro's poetry, instead of fracturing and alienating, unites and gathers both the personal and the collective human experiences as unique but shared experiences of love, friendship, passion, and loss. In the immediacy of its expression, D'Alessandro's poetry articulates both the palpable urgency to live and the pensive potency to reflect on the past and on what has been... (He) seeks a correspondence, similar to that of French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, between the earthly realm of human experiences to the interpretive realms of language."Italian-based, Irish writer/journalist Hugo McCafferty writes: "Franco D'Alessandro's poetry is the silver thread that weaves together the major events, places, people and themes of his life. His work has a sense of time and place, that the past is present within us and around us, through the deeply held memory of a mother's touch or the unending admiration of a father's square shoulders, we become that which we love. Ireland, Italy, and love are the themes that form the pillars of this work, the pantheon of a life lived with the passion of an Italian, the recklessness of an Irishman and the sensitivity of an artist. There is tenderness here despite having weathered the winter of life's harshness, there is not a hint of cynicism, but instead quiet ebullience that is a gift of hope to us all. To read and feel the poems in 'Everything is Something Else' is to walk the cobblestoned streets of Rome, or Galway or the sun-baked sidewalks of New York with him and to know that you too are home."

Selling the Family shares the reflections of a sole surviving family member as she sorts several generations of belongings for a final estate auction, a quintessential experience in rural America.The setting is a 33-acre property in southwestern Wisconsin, a forested coulee on the Mississippi River, but the story is reflective of any rural setting in the Upper Midwest. Nancy Kay Peterson recounts the deaths of her immediate family and watches an auctioneer's staff organize the sale of what to the family were thoughtfully acquired possessions collected over several lifespans. She sees childhood treasures tossed together for bundled bids, her father's WWII memorabilia appraised, gifts given laid out for re-sale, unsaleable household goods thrown into the trash. As the staff works, Nancy "saves" what she can by giving items away to friends - "grandmother's quilts and doilies, never used egg coddlers, silver appetizer forks, Norwegian sweaters." She picks up useful items like poster putty, but also rescues the unnecessary -- her sister's small wooden puffin and her brother-in-law's Norwegian bottle opener. As she watches the meaningful property in her relatives' eyes being transformed into merchandise to be sold or simply trashed, Nancy relives the memories she will never again be able to share with someone else who remembers them, too. Just before the auction, she strews the ashes of her sister and brother-in-law on the land they loved, and as she walks the property one last time, she examines the depth of her grief.While the story is melancholy, it's telling is honest, rather than sentimental, cathartic, rather than debilitating, and ends, as it must, on a thin note of joy and gratitude for the love once shared.

In Clearing the Mask, Gay Parks Rainville assembles a collage of lyric snapshots, each one poignantly rendered and vividly imagined. The discerning poet-speaker reflects on both personal history and the state of the world, and through her steady, unflinching gaze, demonstrates that the only way to live a life-with all its joys and heartbreaks, its fortunes and losses-is "not past but through." -Christine Kitano, author of Sky Country and Birds of ParadiseThis lovely collection of poems concerns itself with our fundamental realities-life, love, and death. Our hold on the first two is always tenuous; only the last is certain. And yet these poems also realize how our experience of these realities is blunted and coarsened by the lull of materialism, our American dream that all of life ought to be one smooth ride. Everywhere the poems in this collection note painful exceptions to such a myth. Our relative comfort, in other words, comes with a cost, perhaps a cost so great and myriad that the comfort is in the end unreal. This is a book riddled with implied questions the poems glide over, acknowledging our preference for a sense of innocence that isn't quite right. The glimpse of uncertainty here is certain and satisfying. -Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter, Gone and the Going Away, The Common Man, Bucolics, A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c., and Lawrence Booth's Book of VisionsIn the beautiful poem "Cohabitation," it's the working-class neighbor's dog that sets off the outdoor alarm system, whereas the fox in the woods seems a companion, a protector. This collection explores issues of ecology, nature and culture, isolation and community, with an authority grounded in the author's childhood in the "Cancer Valley" of West Virginia. It's full of what Virgil called "the tears of things": the village drowned under the lake created by a dam; the immensely talented college roommate Googled years later, only to find she has been sentenced to nine years in prison for fraud; the woman with dementia who finds her husband a "Perfect Stranger." This is a haunting, as well as a beautiful, book. -Alan Williamson, author of Franciscan Notes, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems, Res Publica, and Love and the Soul

In her tender and incisive debut poetry collection, Red List Blue (Semifinalist, Codhill Press Poetry Award), Lizzy Fox navigates love, loss, and anxiety against the backdrop of today's global environmental crises. Fox catalogues failed relationships and dying species, explores complicity in the rapid decline of the natural world, and meditates on the small and stubbornly hopeful, making Red List Blue both ode and elegy in equal measure. Poet Cynthia Huntington writes, "These poems...radiate a hard-earned love for this difficult world." Poems in the collection have been previously published in journals such as The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, and Puerto Del Sol.

Marjie Giffin's chapbook debut, Touring, traverses the landscape of America, family, and social inequities with observant detail. An encounter with a homeless woman on the steps of a Milwaukee church is just as thought-provoking as the poet's recollection of stepping past shivering homeless persons on the periphery of Harvard. Poignant reflections emerge from both a dusty drive through a ghostly Southwestern village and a middle-aged dip into a pristine Northern lake. A sense of others' entitlement arises when the poet faces restrictions against viewing a New England landscape in "Dead End."Long-ago love is experienced anew in "Back in '73" and heartbreak recounted in "The Potted Plant."A doting mother and grandmother, Giffin writes with obvious devotion to her offspring in poems like "A Place of Peace" and "Grandbaby." Sardonic humor flourishes in her retelling of traveling with adult offspring in "Backseat Rider," while the joy of road-tripping with friends is apparent in "Girls Trip."The title poem, "Touring," takes a step back in time to a favorite card game of Giffin's father, while the collection's ending poem, "Empty City," recreates the eerily quiet atmosphere caused by today's very real experience, the Coronavirus.Poems from Giffin's chapbook have also appeared in Blue Heron Review; Flying Island; Poetry Quarterly; Northwest Indiana Literary Journal; Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing; So It Goes: The Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Nos. 6 and 7; St. Katherine Review; The Lives We Live(d) In: An Anthology of Poems about Social Justice; and Tipton Poetry Journal.

Kristine Williams' first chapbook, Like an Empty House, examines the everyday, those things we often overlook. Through her poems, what others take for granted, becomes transcendent. Using language that is vivid, tactile, often visceral, her work offers us new ways to experience a familiar touch, wash the dishes, take a walk, and in doing so, shows us that common experiences can become a connection to a beautifully complex world. The poems in Like an Empty House explore raising children to adulthood and, ultimately, letting go. Through the metaphor of getting a tattoo with her daughter, the reader can't help but recognize that the pain of getting a tattoo is just one of many hurts that mothers experience. She easily moves from fixing cars in the garage to fixing herself after retirement, from standing in the snow in flip flops while her dog explores in the dark to standing while her husband points out an Eastern Bluebird against the snow.This is also a love story. Like an Empty House shares stories of the long-married with a keen eye, with honesty and openness, showing us that while there is still conflict and resentment, there is also still discovery, still heat and passion.Williams' poems from her experience in a Montessori preschool find meaning in a naptime routine and explore the impact of the opioid crisis in small towns in southeast Ohio.Williams brings us into the natural world that surrounds her in her home of Athens, Ohio and points readers to peepers in a pond or a truck shifting gears on an Appalachian highway. She invites us to stop and clearly see and listen to those things we might be tempted to rush past. Stars overhead become a place to wander. A trip to the road with a trashcan or walking the dog are a meditation. In examining the minutiae of the everyday, she expands the world so that we see our humanity, our connectedness, our vulnerability.In the end, the stories in these poems fill what might once have been an empty house with truths that the reader should not turn away from. Like an Empty House invites us to enter and promises that we will not be disappointed.