Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Kay Bell's poems in Diary of an Intercessor are hymns, songs, odes and elegies that grace the difficult subjects: tough childhoods, parenting, ancestry, race and class in America. Though the Bible is referenced, the poems create their own biblical tone; casting spells to ward off evil, protect the new generation and confess the truth in fierce and stark vernacular. In the land where Trayvon Martin was murdered, Jacob Lawrence painted the Great Migration and Langston Hughes inspired dreams, this poet is courageous and fearless with language and images to paint the streets and islands of the countries she has lived in and moved through. The call towards home the reader discovers, finally rests in the poems themselves. Bell is a traveller through time, family and ancestry and her poems are a call to follow her on that journey. -Michelle Valladares, Author of Nortada, the North Wind

There's a rope between two burning towers. One tower burns anxiously. The other tower (the left side of the brain) burns orderly. Randall is dancing on that rope. It is the motion-a footfall, a locomotive blowing hard, a wave-that keeps her from falling. An ecstasy is a song to motion, to ex stasis, and Randall belts it true enough to pop the deepest bass string on your Fender Squier guitar. -Barrett Warner, Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?These powerful poems erode our physical boundaries leaving us to explore mental illness as a patient and as a caregiver alternatively. With ferocity yet in a ceremony of revelation, Michele Parker Randall's A Future Unmapable artfully discloses the unfathomable struggle of helping a beloved come back from the brink. Honest and courageous, each poem is a study of the much-needed conversation of what it is like to live with and recover from such a destabilizing experience. -Didi Jackson, Moon JarIn A Future Unmappable, Michele Parker Randall explores the nakedness of mental uncertainty: What is real? what is not? when "unable to tell the dream-state from the wake-state / Try to free someone from inside a balloon." Muted tension screams in the torque of Randall's lines: "coiledspring / a snake" "between the wardscape / walls" "how many worlds we / fit in one day." These panoptic poems offer a view from the in-between lest any of us be too sure. -Tanya Grae, Undoll

In this debut chapbook, feline companions, nature, and imagination help the poems' protagonist and readers navigate different ages of loss by being mindful in the search for refuge. Better Living through Cats takes readers on a transtemporal excursion to meet ancestors, reflect on childhood, and face middle-age responsibilities. Throughout the pages, cats interact sweetly with each other and their humans. Some help quell anxiety and depression; others sit with grief. As metaphors for a range of human emotions, cats pad alongside generations of family members. Joy, fatigue, grief, awe, anticipation, and hope spring from the poems. When conditions pass from house to home as inherited culture, how can one negotiate the past and continuous change for better living? The poet escorts readers across the U.S. from Southern roots to a Midwest stopover to pine-filled Washington State. History unfolds in poetic lines as the author's language forges through troubled dreams to metered visions, contemplates gardens and woods, and searches to transgress constraints. A hopeful arc points to living fully by polishing one's essence-whether out in the world or at home with a cat. The chapbook's themes feature memory, place, home, agency, and resilience, all of which are central issues in author Clark A. Pomerleau's creative writing and historical study.

What happens if we imagine beyond the confines of what we are told is possible? This question runs through the hearts of the poems in Rachel Economy's The Origins of Streams. Glimmers of answers emerge in conversations and overlaps with animals, plants, the soil itself. The Origins of Streams invites the reader into sensory awakening as a human body within the bigger body of the world. Whether the topic is chronic illness, creation myths, heartbreak, or the ethics of big agribusiness, these poems queer and dissolve the (often artificial) separations placed between the human and non-human world. Love poems are populated with plants. Decomposition and the movement of matter become essential processes for reorganizing the world towards justice. Grief and loss offer richness and regrounding in ecological relationship between watersheds and human bodies. Food is a tapestry that grows and graces tables and words throughout. More than anything, these poems speak deeply to what being alive feels like, and what being alive could be. Moving from land-as-origin-story, through themes of dancing, apocalypse, animacy, and refuge, Rachel Economy immerses us in the body of now, and in the seeds of a fragmented and thriving future.

In his second full-length poetry book, On Razor-Thin Tires, Charles Halsted explores connections with parents and siblings, friends and neighbors, birds and nature, and reactions to the world he lives in. Central to his life is his choice of a career in medicine, an inspiration for poems on becoming and being a physician. Through the eighty poems in in this book, Charles Halsted reflects on each stage of life, from childhood to adulthood to aging.

Michael Beebe is a refreshing addition to the small club of contemporary poets who are infused with the traditions of philosophy. Beebe's stoic attitude and disarmingly vulnerable honesty make a distinctive and addictive mix, and they speak of male vulnerability in ways that are not often heard. These are poems worth taking in slowly, and repeatedly. -Annie Finch

Two years at an assisted living facility (as the primary caregiver of her favorite relative, a celebrated character actor) kept Judith Mary Gee at a very high emotional pitch. Following his passing, she returned to her own residence bearing a grief bordering on breakdown. Finding solace in music, dance, and various other art forms, Gee gradually resumed practice of her own longtime craft, writing poetry.Gee's work has appeared in Chautauqua and is scheduled to appear in The New Guard, as well as in the second volume of Global Insides, an anthology of work created during the current pandemic.Her poems depict unthinkable loss (of love, limb, life, lucidity) resulting from war, disease, or occupation in startling-sometimes fantastical-images.A Sarah Lawrence College graduate, Gee was a protégé of literature professor Harold Wiener, whose tales of corresponding with John Galsworthy, dining with Greta Garbo and Rudolf Nureyev, and mentoring Lesley Gore were inspirational, amusing, and indelibly imprinted on her memory. Having studied poetry with Cynthia Macdonald (Gee was her teaching assistant), Jane Cooper, and Jean Valentine, she believes her writing skills assist in self-healing.Now sheltering in place, like many of you, Judith Mary Gee offers her Edges of Wanting.

The poems of "what mothers withhold" are songs of brokenness and hope in a mother's voice, poems of the body in its fierceness and failings. Elizabeth Kropf's poems revel in peeling back silence, and invite us to witness a complicated and traumatic world that is also filled with love. -Cindy Huyser, poet and editor, author of Burning Number Five: Power Plant PoemsWith these visceral poems, poet and mother Elizabeth Kropf has composed a chant of the vocabulary of vulnerability. From fertility to conception to birth-or not-and into motherhood, Kropf's recounting of her experiences compels the reader to enter and acknowledge the power of what mothers endure and withhold. -Anne McCrady, author of Letting Myself In and Along Greathouse Road

What could "Hats are the Enemy of Poetry" possibly mean? Absurdly, it invites the reader to put on her thinking cap. Or better, to go bareheaded into the book, the first poem of which is entitled: Emily Dickinson is not in. Please leave a message. What message? The reader will decide, as always. But at the least, she will be exposed to the elements. "Before hummingbirds, Sweetheart,/there was plutonium," as the final poem in the collection begins, ending "in the garden of a God/ we do not, cannot, comprehend,/ for what seems more than/ an instant, but less than eternity."

Loosely following a linear timeline from childhood to old age, Adler's story-like poems highlight the emotional core that lives within life's ordinary moments. Illustrating the delicate yet complex nuances of human relationships, Adler imbues with equal intensity her portrayals of both gut-punch and near-miss life events. Serving as backdrop and salve for the emotions the poems elicit, nature and food play soothing and colorful parts in this collection. Undressing the Heart is a book for anyone who's ever experienced love, pain, and hope.

Blending humor with pathos, The Pugilist's Daughter illuminates some of the complications inherent in a fateful family position as the daughter most emotionally enmeshed with a wayward father. Some of the poems like "First Night," "How Insomnia Runs Through a Bloodline," "Black Pearl," and the titular poem portray a childhood and youth scarred by sorrow and loss, while others, such as "Story," "It Was Like This," and "Vigil" trace some of the steps and missteps taken to unravel the Gordian knot characteristic of this position within an "electric" constellation. Buoyed by humor, blunt charm, and the desperate pursuit of serenity in impossible situation, Lowery's account charts a narrow path out of dangerous waters in poems such as "After My Seventh Christmas," "At Mass," "Greensfield Park, North Side, Age Thirteen," and "Childlike."A native of Central New York State-where she still spends part of her summers-Lowery sets most of the poems in the small industrial town of Johnson City, NY, or in her father's birthplace of Syracuse. Additionally, some poems refer to Texas, where the poet's father lived for a few years, held, as he phrased it "an economic hostage." The poet has lived in Texas and taught literature and creative writing full time for many years in the English Department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.This collection is the tip of the iceberg in what the poet hopes will be a full collection of poetry coming out in the next few years. Three of the poems in this collection ("It Was Like This," "A Man Takes a Drink, A Drink Takes a Drink, A Drink Takes a Man," and "I Never Said,") were first "made public" in Lowery's play A Heroine Free Summer, given an equity production in Houston by Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company in the spring of 2017. The California Quarterly (defunct for decades now) published "Married Off" as "Married," in one of its last issues, and "How Insomnia Runs Through a Bloodline" is forthcoming from Texas 7, (TACWT Proceedings). She wrote some of the earliest poems in this collection under the tutelage of poet Ruth Stone, her mentor and PhD dissertation director, at Binghamton University. Lowery's work has been influenced by the poetry of Sharon Olds, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop and many others. If she could write like Wallace Stevens, she would.

In this stunning debut collection, A Glint of Light, Fredric Hildebrand celebrates--with sadness, praise, and astute observations-nature, the seasons, and people among us. In short luminous poems, he reveals the extraordinary aspects of ordinary things.A native of Neenah, Wisconsin, Hildebrand weaves this rural setting into his work, paying tribute to such poets as Tom Hennen and Ted Kooser. "At the Polling Place" praises a small-town community. With powerful imagery, love of nature runs through "The Sound of Spring," "Above the Flambeau River," "Prairie Morning," and others. "On the Way to the Mayo Clinic," "Autumn Frost," and "A Funeral" explore the difficult themes of grief and loss, but in "How Many Mornings," "Psalm," and "Geese in April," Hildebrand finds grace and gratitude in the blessing of ordinary days.In the tradition of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, the language in A Glint of Light is spare and accessible. The collection opens with "At the Ojibwa All-Night Diner," which won honorable mention for the 2017 Mill Prize for Poetry. The final poem is "The Forest Trail," first published in ArtAscent. Poems in this collection have also appeared in Bramble, Millwork, The Raven Review, Right-Hand Pointing, and Verse-Virtual. This volume is Hildebrand's overdue introduction to a national audience.

Automotive explores how cars and roads shape our thoughts and identities. The poems in this collection form a memoir in errands and accidents, ordinary commutes and cross-country road trips.

"Dotty LeMieux's poems sing about life in diners and on streets and in the natural world, about resistance and the grace of acceptance. They are deeply felt and charming observations about our shared humanity." -Anne Lamott, best-selling author of Bird by Bird and Almost Everything"Each poem here, rich with the sights, sounds, and smells of our familiar everyday, brings us news of our own world we may not have seen as clearly before. With wit and abundant vision, Dotty LeMieux delivers a lively, insightful collection." -Jacqueline Kudler, author of Sacred Precinct, Sixteen Rivers Press, and teacher in memoir writing and literature at the College of Marin, Kentfield, California. Kudler received the Marin Poetry Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010

Gregory Loselle's new chapbook gathers the work that has occupied him most often in the last several years: observations of the animals among us, domestic and wild. In careful, often formal verse, he draws on direct and reported experience to isolate and analyze moments of reflection, elaborating on the moral significance of our experiences with nature. News stories of remarkable encounters with nature, scientific reports, and simple, backyard observations stress the proximity and importance of animate life around us.

In this follow-up to his earlier chapbook, Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father (FLP, 2015), Luther Jett confronts the ephemeral nature of our lives, the process of grief, and the endurance of memory. Jett draws upon recollections of family, as well as historical events and forces to weave a tapestry of image and reflection. Loss "... comes with the ticking of clocks ..." the author reminds us in his title poem, "... and that is why the ocean tastes of tears." Jett writes of ghostly grandfather clocks that walk in the night, of forgotten toys scattered in an unmown lawn, of the importance and the hidden dangers of holding on to memory. "What can I sing to tell your feast?" Jett asks in the poem "Seamus", adding in his later poem, "One by One", "I chant the names of things long after they have gone."Maryland's Poet Laureate, Grace Cavalieri says of Jett's work: "[N]ever have the dead been more alive .... Subtle and intelligent stories, realized through the power of Jett's voice, make life appear on every page." In this time of world-wide pandemic and upheaval, "Everyone Disappears" may take on additional resonance as we grope for understanding in the face of tragedy and uncertainty.

If you're looking for a short-yet-compelling book of poetry relevant to the current state of the world, look no further. Romantic Portrait of a Natural Disaster is a chapbook-length collection of poems in which up-and-coming poet Hannah Cajandig-Taylor navigates what it means to live in a world that seems to always be ending. From images of mountain glaciers to cosmic odes and everything in-between, her work implores the reader to consider what happens when we are honest and vulnerable about the way in which we destroy both the world and ourselves.Though many of these poems have been published in prominent literary journals, such as Pretty Owl Poetry, Sonora Review, and LandLocked Magazine, nearly two-thirds of these works are appearing in-print for the first time. This chapbook also contains Cajandig-Taylor's prose poem/hybrid piece "You as Apocalypse", which was nominated by Gordon Square Review for a Best Small Fictions award in 2019.However, all of the poems in this book have three things in common: a desire to look to the clouds and constellations for escape, a desire to understand how things fall apart, and a desire to find hope in a world that constantly breaks. Furthermore, the underlying threads of anxiety, weather, astronomy, and nostalgia stitch these poems together into a beautiful and chaotic mess, in which we are urged to find something lovely in the darkest of places.

All Our Fare-Thee-Wells will appeal to dyed-in-the-wool Deadheads, to anyone who ever sang or hummed along to the band's infectious tunes and lyrics, and to anyone who misses or thinks they miss the Sixties.

Mark Lilley's Lucky Boy is filled with hints of unsettledness: bus tickets, a storm front, a rootless father, any number of nervously-smoked cigarettes. In cars, vans, pickups, and big rigs, characters seem almost continually on the move. What remains in place, however, is the poet-his unwavering allegiance to memory and attention, as if the poems are a response to Lowell's question "Yet why not say what happened?" In a plain style that is deceptively simple, Lilley chooses just the right word or concrete detail, creates subtle sonic echoes, and leaps suddenly, briefly, into startling metaphors, so these clear-eyed poems are an expression, finally, of something deep and nearly unnameable-some sense that, whatever our afflictions and yearnings, it is still possible, and necessary, to love what we have been given. It is possible to consider ourselves lucky. We are lucky to have this beautiful, wise book. -Chris Forhan, author of My Father Before Me: A Memoir, Black Leapt In, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, and Forgive Us Our HappinessMark Lilley's debut collection, Lucky Boy, is a graceful and devastating volume, offered through the voice of a survivor. These poems narrate the struggles, dysfunctions and failures of an American family through fearless disclosures, exquisite language, and gentle ironies. I am deeply struck by this poet's unwavering eye and ear and narrative balance-his aesthetic depth and steadiness in the thick of these disastrous, broken characters and settings. Lilley's tonal control is heroic, given the traumatized interior of these narrations. Lilley's poems remind us that the poem comes bravely, urgently out of the seizure of human despair. It is their artistic and humane victory to transport us to these realms with compassionate insights, empathy and hard-earned tenderness. These poems take us on the impossible yet inevitable journey to personal reckoning. Mark Lilley's lovely and relentless poems answer our human failures with a quiet embrace, acceptance, and a loving ferocity. This is a book always to keep within reach. -George Eklund, author of Altar, Wanting To Be an Element, The Island Blade, and Each Breath I Cannot HoldEnter the deeply emotional world of Mark Lilley's Lucky Boy and you will encounter people striving to escape the inescapable, whether their fates or their hearts. As these poems skillfully navigate the hard truths of poverty, alcoholism, and infidelity, they are punctuated by acts of kindness-from a trucker, a bereft mother, a river. Lilley's poetry itself is a profound act of unequivocal kindness. In its devotion and attentiveness to the broken family, each poem "hold[s] [a] match steady until the stub glows." These poems depict both the wronged and the wrongdoer with an abiding compassion. By the book's end, we are listening to a river, understanding that everyone's been wronged somehow. Lilley's beautifully understated images sing to us as we grieve "through patches of clover and foamflower, / and what they found downstream." I love these lyrical vignettes for their tenderness, for how they address losses often too deep to name. "Why men drift, where men linger, / what happens when a woman receives word." They speak with the hard-earned eloquence of a grief addressed and absorbed. This is a book the world needs, especially now. It is a reminder to be empathetic, humble, and forgiving. These poems will teach you to care. -Alessandra Lynch, author of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment and It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight

Beth Oast Williams's debut chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, explores the intersection of the human experience with our natural landscape. Raised on the Elizabeth River, Williams paints the waterways of Southeastern Virginia as a rich backdrop for both memory poems and for ones that look to the future. Here, floods and storms pair with parental loss and the realization that human beings have such little control over nature's force.The opening poem, "Elizabeth River Rising", invokes many of the chapbook's themes: the flooding river, the yearning for a lost mother, the author's search for spiritual answers in nature.We celebrate the exhilaration of sailing in "Mother Still Breathes in the Wind", where the speaker can "ride the back of wild/horses in the harbor", a reference to white caps kicked up by the wind. This joy is offset by and the sullen kayak journey in "How Shallow the Creek". Many poems pay tribute to her mother and father, including "Mother's Death is Hard to Swallow" and "Nor'easter's Path"."These Stars, Now Your Mother's Eyes" alludes to religious history and speaks to the sudden loss of a loved one, with the hope that they may be present with us, if only as stars.This collection includes "Drink In The Morning', which was the author's first published poem. It appeared in Lou Lit. Other poems in this collection were published in Crab Creek Review, Lou Lit, Red Earth Review, Soft Cartel, The Sunlight Press, and Willard and Maple.

Karen Jones' new chapbook, Seasons of Earth and Sky, is a beautiful lyric to nature in all its splendor, from its vast vistas ("John Day River Canyon") to the first dogwood flower in spring ("Narrow Trail in April"). -Doug Stone, author of The Season of Distress and Clarity and The Moon's Soul Shimmering on the Water

Through this tilted tumbler / glass, in a restaurant, / I view the moon, / see-through and magnified. These lines that open Terri McCord's poem "Through and Through" suggest her penchant for looking at the world from whatever quirky angle she can extemporize. How lucky we are that in this collection she shares with us her brilliant discoveries. Among her many skills, McCord is a master of startling transitions and stunning metaphors. These are poems that must be read again and again in order to fully appreciate all that lies beneath their initial charm. McCord's new collection is, indeed, A Beaut. -Cathy Smith BowersYes, / my leitmotif is beauty / beauty at every end, writes Terri Lee McCord, but she doesn't take us there by any of the usual routes, and what is revealed as beauty has little to do with what we might have expected it to be. Elliptical, quietly intelligent, and charged with surprising perceptions, this collection is a stunner. -Claire BatemanTerri McCord is a painter as well as a poet, and I continue to be surprised and delighted by her visual imagination. She sees both clearly and deeply-as her words sometimes glimmer, sometimes flare, always illuminate. Like the artist she praises in "Believing Design," She has learned /which strokes which hues // faithfully coax the eye / into believing believing // in permanence of a kind. This is a lovely book. -Gilbert Allen

"In Heirloom, Megan Krupa strums the hidden tendons that connect a body to its geography. Here, the smokestacks of Appalachia are inseparable from the corpses in the ground. Here, the trees are as silent as the people left to tend them. Simultaneously lush and limber, Megan's poems concoct one of the most merciful, striking depictions of rural loss in poetry today." -Jerrod Schwarz, author of No Name Atkins

Not-Yet Elegies is a speculative, probing conversation with history about our collective human future. Covey-Smith filters the contemporary world through a literary lens, drawing on philosophical and historical texts and journalism to ask questions that elicit an existential flux between hope and grief.