Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Szilvasy's aptly titled Witness Marks takes on the one wholly predictable reality in every human life, beginning with its visits to us at the family home, the smallest of the concentric circles we inhabit. What these poems witness to, and "sign" with their beautiful, straightforward, musical "marks," is no less than death, as encountered by fathers and mothers; widows who pass their mourning flowers to their neighbors; beloved pets, and the owners who bury them with "grave gifts," like pharaohs, even when we feel "sad and silly" doing so; survivors still longing for the words we all leave unsaid when we go; atheist friends too honest to offer, by way of consolation, anything more than "a drink." But gradually, these poems enlarge the circle until it finally includes the prehistoric ancestor who, after millenia buried in a glacier, "was rolled out of snow" to a kind of resurrection. "Death colors everything," says "Epistle," but the rest doesn't disappear: the stars remain, although they "will always have a melancholy tint." Without making promises they can't keep; without pretending the natural world can provide what only human love can give us; without denying the undeniable, or forgetting the threats and losses that devastate the living, the poem that closes the book claims that "the earth is beautiful beyond all change." The poet, now as the devil's advocate, disputes that claim, and challenges the poem with hard, painful questions. But the claim is there, a counterweight to what we know, and persuasive enough to endure, as only poetry this good can do. -Rhina P. EspaillatAndrew Szilvasy has chosen an ingenious title for his first publication. With these poems as witness marks, he pieces together a life and makes his way in the world, beginning from square one, his childhood home. One poem gives us a portrait of his parents, their faces lit by the television screen. Another brings incorrigible Uncle Billy into the already cramped and overheated living space. And "Epistle to Brett, on the Death of his Mother," the collection's defining poem, gives us a portrait of the young poet himself. Feeling inadequate to the task of consoling his friend, he ramps up his rhetoric. When he catches himself waxing poetic, distancing himself not only from his friend but from his own experience of loss, he starts over. It's "as if the sun / exploded in your mind," he blurts out. That is what it's like to lose your mom. Such vulnerability, and the desire to keep it hidden, give the poem its expressive charge. This debut collection marks the first steps of a wayfarer setting out. It is an auspicious beginning. -Alfred Nicol

"What is my life? What is in my life? Why now do I understand rest, and the connection between body and mind?" "Do I still believe I can find color and joy and openness daily? Can I make a declaration with awareness of ability, oh, and Where am I going?"In Iris Gersh's debut collection of poetry, A Thousand Questions, questions appear often without answers. Her book of poems describes a scattered life, a few attempts at fitting in, changes in lifestyle from a kid growing up in the Shawangunk country with a spirited, and almost always emotional Jewish family. Along her route, she writes about "Crazy Women" and "Fear in America" as well as navigating dental care in "Your Teeth". When the early seventies sounded the death knoll for a Liberal Art's Degree, and 150 resumes landed not one response for her, Gersh took a job at as a unit clerk in a heroin detoxification unit. She thought that further education in and of itself was probably a good idea for the future of someone else. In the summer of 1973, she accepted her brother's invitation to live up at Lama Mountain in northern New Mexico. Few details had been revealed either to her or her parents, and those six years of living in an intentional community, the years in her twenties, the seventies in Taos, are her happiness and the time that she gains survival skills, physical and spiritual.Many years later in her mid-forties, Gersh takes a chance on love when she moves to Greece. A Thousand Questions leaves us wondering why. The author feels that the most resonating pieces are of Greece where she spent eight years living with her boyfriend. Why had she stayed in the face of emotional abuse?Angelos Sikelianos is one of the author's favorite poets. In his poem "The Sacred Way", the narrator says, "But farther on, as if the world/had disappeared and nature alone was left/ unbroken stillness reigned. And the rock I found/rooted at the roadside seemed like a throne/long predestined for me." These words have led her to believe that she too has learned the skill of turning a "rock into a throne." Delusion or illusion?In the writer's mind, the Catskills were a blur of skedding down hills and staying indoors in the wintry weather. How could it be just that? In writing this book, Gersh discovers the makeup of her original family, different from her original narrative, and tells stories of her younger years in her poems, such as in "Grandma Rebecca" and "Mahogany Night Stick".When her "shell of her former self," as a niece described her upon her return to New Mexico, dropped down in Albuquerque, she was home. Whereas the commune days gave her the impression Albuquerque was just an airport, living here in the last fifteen years has made her feel part of a "place family" where she is involved in many local poetry readings and events. The high desert landscapes, the Sandias, the Rio Grande bosque-all have imbued her spirit during these challenging times.

In Walk on Air, Deirdre Cornell gracefully uses the haiku as a form of meditation as she ruminates on middle age, marriage, and her lifelong love-the Hudson River. Her haiku artfully echo her footsteps as they mirror the beauty of nature and sound. -Caledonia Kearns, author of A Daughter's Work is Heartless by NatureDeirdre Cornell astonishes in these haiku that reveal the beauty and paradoxes of the magnificent Hudson River Valley. She recalls the great poet Basho whose haiku for five centuries have been opening eyes and souls to the realities of peace, joy, suffering, harmony, love, and goodness that lie behind appearances. Deirdre's first book was a memoir of growing up in a town on the same river. Older now, but still seeing the world with fresh eyes, she gives us priceless views on every page. -Michael Leach, author of Soul SeeingDeirdre Cornell's small poems take us with them to a quiet attentive place where we can sense connections, marvel, and feel a sense of calm acceptance. -Hannah Mahoney, PoetThe Haiku poems are evocative and uplifting. I could feel myself out on the Walkway, experiencing its ever changing beauty. -Elizabeth Waldstein, Executive Director, Walkway Over the Hudson organization"Rain + sun = rainbow" / Few words, ponder much / For few words = thank you / / Grateful for small bites / Bathe in river's light- / Walk in Deirdre's air. -Trina Paulus, author of Hope for the Flowers

Dinosaur Hour, as a collection is concerned with the violence in nature, but also how articulating violence done to or by nature provided a relief from the strongest doubts of life, presenting a fresh, 21st century ars poetica response to the Romantic view of landscape holding all truths.Poem after poem, Roy presents imagery of a brutal (or brutalized) landscape against which humans are silent, ambivalent, and torn. His pastoral violence emerges as the most apt articulation in the speaker's interactions with others and with his own memories, anxieties around the passage of time, and concerns about what happens after this life ends.

Louisa Muniz's debut collection is a testament to the power of healing and reclamation that follow personal family loss & longing. With her artistry of words and beautiful images she pulls us into magical, surreal & sometimes strange landscapes that powerfully transfix and transform us. Among this selection of poems is Stone Turned Sand, the 2019 Spring Contest Winner for the Sheila-Na-Gig Journal along with the poem, Last Time I Buried My Body in Silence, nominated for Best of the Net.

Barbara de la Cuesta's novella, The Mists, is a fascinating read. The characters are pulled into the midst of conflict and self awareness in the misty mountains of Central America. The reader is whole-heartedly pulled into the minds and hearts of de la Cuesta's characters. -Leah Huete de Maines

A lyric leap forward from Harry Bauld's playful and passionate debut, The Uncorrected Eye, How to Paint a Dead Man peers so intensely at art that the verse becomes somehow both hallucinatory and colloquial at the same time. The new collection leaves aside the formal dance of some of the earlier work but extends the vivid and often comic explorations of art and the American vernacular. With no-look pathos and sudden jazzy riffs, many of these poems vamp on artists from Renaissance how-to author Cennino Cennini through Canaletto, Rembrandt, Magritte, the German Expressionists, and Picasso, often through dramatic monologues; Bauld also pitches playfully through fellow writers Mark Strand and Joyce Carol Oates, among others, to tap into the turbulent spirit of the moment. "Always now / it seems we look at art and it looks back / at us on trial," as he writes in "The Eyes."One figure that looms large here belongs to 80's avatar Jean-Michel Basquiat, the former street graffiti artist who shot to world-wide fame and died of a drug overdose at twenty seven. Bauld, who spends part of the year in the Basque country and has written previously about that region's complex history, is oddly sensitive to the seemingly merely linguistic tie between Basque and Basquiat. It's the voice of a Basquiat angel in "Annunciation" who says, "You already/gave birth to this flame/you don't know the name of." The painted "dead man" of the title takes on many identities: not only the poet's father but Basquiat, Mark Strand, the victims of a mass shooting--and the shooter himself--as well as each of the artists evoked, having passed ironically under Bauld's gaze from observer to observed, painter to model, creator to subject. "Art is always saying hello and poetry is always saying goodbye," reads the Kenneth Koch inscription to the book's opening poem, the punning and satirical list, "Duals in the Old West." ("The sun is always saying shut up and the moon is always whispering tell me more....")But Bauld sets out not just to burlesque and blur but to erase these teasing but finally facile dualities. This a collection that displays, explores, and ultimately fuses all sorts of opposition: fame and obscurity, serenity and violence, inner and outer experience, what's real and what's imagined. One expects no less from a poet whose own name is an oxymoron.Still, floating above the undercurrent of death-haunted discontent and loss is also a delight-the hello of art, in Bauld's case verbal as well as visual, in the face of elegy's traditional goodbye: "It's what you do after you go down/that counts," he writes in "Self Portrait as Marco Polo as Miles Davis" about the floored boxer Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. And in "Cadillac Moon," with a sidelong swipe at our current political scene, the poet observes a Basquiat rendering of a car: a set of fantasy wheels that play like four-square in the hands of children who, like the seven artists who will save us, plow their fingers in paint furrows to change all the colors of today's sky, rub out the authoritarian moon and everything under it, making a holy mess and moving

Caught in the Light is an arresting and eloquent poetry collection that evokes the poet's experience during and after her father's dying and death. At the same time, it pays homage to the land she inhabits with the rest of us, "a place where dark means dark," where, after her father's death, eagles still "wheel across flat gray sky, as if nothing/had ever changed." What she reveres-people she loves, land that is continually altered by humans-is also what she cannot hold onto, except in such poems as these. Walker is aperceptive and articulate observer, and this is an exceptional first book.-Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky Erika Walker's Caught in the Light confronts a "fractured map I could not read." The chronicle of her father's decline, Walker's poems issue from this rupture with scrupulous care and tenderness, measuring death against life with honesty and lyrical acuity. Yes, the world of father and daughter reverberates with loss; it is also replete with wonder, affection, and the small miracles of memory. Walker's exquisite attention conjures a ghost: "the slow wander/of his hands as they tunneled down the sleeves" and "yellow leather driving gloves/curled in the shape of his hands." These poems offer reassurance that what is most precious cannot be destroyed and will never really be lost to us.-Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts To be caught in the light of Erika Walker's chapbook is to feel the simultaneous beauty and terror of life. The wounds of loss splinter the soul, and light becomes both the puncture and our balm. Here we move through the relational landscapes of self, place, and family, delving deep into singular images that root in contemplation and stillness. She shows us how to remain grounded in times of turmoil. "Here is a place where aspen trace deep water/and the scree scree of the hawk stops your blood."-Andrea Rexilius, author of Sister Urn

The poems in From the Depth of this Journey by Isabel Huston explore the subtle ways nature reveals our own essence. The reader is invited to the place where "The Harbor and the sky are a riot of clashing blues / Boats snugly rocking / Telling shushing secrets in the / Knock knock of their hulls." There is a profound emotional honesty in Huston's poems.-Leah Huete de Maines

Patrice Melnick's latest collection is a Dear John letter to her "old lover," New Orleans. Amidst brown scum waterlines and refrigerators taped shut like rancid clams, her post-Katrina speaker recalls the good times of the broken relationship. Many writers have conveyed the sights or tastes of the city, but Melnick excels at capturing its smells, sounds, and sweaty skin-feels. The City of Hey Baby is also the City of Can't Forget You, Baby, this collection makes wonderfully clear. -Julie KaneIn City of Hey Baby, Patrice Melnick captures and celebrates the heart and soul of post-Katrina New Orleans, from the trials, endurance, and rebirth of human spirit to the music and cuisine that flood waters could not destroy. With nuance and detail that only a lover of the city can see, Melnick patiently and artfully stitches patches of images, feelings, and reflections into a patchwork that is uniquely New Orleans and worth cuddling with. -John Warner Smith, State Poet Laureate of Louisiana

A gimlet-eyed catalogue of the natural world, and, contained within it, the world within ourselves. Irresistible language makes it a classic. Andrew Sean Greer, author of the novel LESS, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winnerThe prose poem, "Hose. Ants. Plants. Expressway." alone makes this delightful chapbook worthy of our close consideration-and is emblematic, too, of this glorious, serious, humorous, loving paean to the natural world and us in it, in this, to quote another poem, "personal myth of the garden. Claire Ortalda, Georgia State University Fiction Prize WinnerIn Judith Cody's gorgeous collection of poems, Garden on an Alien Star, a fistful of soil is a place of endless wonder, where the poet sings praises to decay, and a window box is a magical crossroads where the human and natural worlds interact. The gardener's many relationships with her flowers and weeds are full of metaphors for personal and spiritual relationships. Everyday experiences take on mythical stature, in one poem it's a line of ants along a garden hose, in another poem it's "a descending cascade of petals" distracting a brown towhee from an earwig. The poems in this collection offer the poet's vision of a backyard Eden where today's creation legends continue to be forever born and reborn. John Curl, author of novels, The Outlaws of Maroon, The Co-op Conspiracy and the history, Indigenous Peoples Day

Postcards from the Lilac City knows more than a thing or ten about hometowns and the tithing memory exacts. Mary Ellen Talley, its scribe, knows how memory takes form-repetitively, insistently, in uncontestable numbers, unshakable voices and resonant sensations-and she knows how to give dim shades indelible shape and also when to bide her time, letting the ghosts of the past do their work. She knows the iceberg theory of place, how much of lives spent in quiet places is underground, whispered, half-heard, half-hidden. But, when life does erupt in the Lilac City, it's anything but sedate. It's a spiffed-up antique carousel connecting the living and the dead: "The cemeteries are full / of riders."; it's a lust-ridden stone man sharing a lilac float with the annual crop of Lilac Queen contenders; it's the sputtering butterfly wheel of the narrator's first car; it's a plucky traveler who measures the exotic against home in a series of wry postcards: "This place is 400 years old. I was given a white silk scarf / of respect and I even tried yak butter. I am still so Spokane." This is a fine debut, and the Lilac City couldn't ask for a better bard. -Deborah Woodard, author of Borrowed Tales

"Arresting. This is the word that comes to mind after finishing Sarah Levine's, Take Me Home. From the first lines this collection grabbed my ear the way a good piece of music does, drawing me into its world of intimate utterance and melody. Throughout, Levine masterfully controls line, rhythm and language, building the music to crescendo before easing the tension in final, satisfying resolution. As I said, these poems are simply arresting." -Justen Ahren, author of A Machine For Remembering, and A Strange Catechism"Sarah Levine's poems beat like a heart. Familiar myths twist with each line. Primal, dreamy, and forlorn, like Andrew Wyeth paintings." -Rachel B. Glaser, author of Paulina & Fran"The poems in Take Me Home are filled with startling images that enrich their observations, creating a world that is uniquely new yet entirely familiar. Sarah Levine is an extremely gifted poet who understands the complexity and passion at the heart of the human condition. These finely tuned poems can only enhance the lives of those who read them." -Kevin Pilkington, author of The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree

Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet, he asks, if you had nothing, no sounds of the world coming to you, "would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?" Jennifer's book stays true to Rilke's "treasure-house" of childhood, exploring the richness of a youth growing up in California's farmland... "an island of yard/surrounded by oceans of trees." Jennifer Pickering's poems bring us home. -Robert Stanley, Poet Laureate Sacramento 2009-12What a pleasure it was to read Jennifer's work. Sometimes I simply sat back after reading a poem and said aloud, Wow! Her descriptions are shot through with originality and love. In one of her most powerful poems "The Alchemy of Grief," she writes, "In theory we begin our journeys at birth. Travel backwards moving forward." Take that journey with her in Fruit Box Castles. -Wendy Patrice Williams, In Chaparral: Life on the Georgetown Divide, California (Cold River Press) Bayley House Bard and Some New Forgetting. Her prose is published across the U.S.This collection illuminated with a sense of place: farms, orchards, family, "Mom midwifed rows of freestones...winter Mother sews hope into gingham curtains." There is much to delight in the sensory: stubbled fields, perfume of pears. Hard labor is honored, planting, harvesting, "summer saved in jars." And working in a cannery: "Hands that burn from sweet juice...where jobs were scarce as shade." "Morning light poured across the wooden planks," reminds one of Vermeer. -Jeanine Stevens is the author of, Limberlos, a six-time Pushcart Nominee and the winner of the national poetry award from WOMR.

Soil is a jagged journey through bewildering loss and recapture of love, of self, and of motherhood. It explores a woman's roots, the relationships that warp, buoy, and form her, and the bounty that inevitably blooms through gratitude. Two of the poems were finalists for Mid-American Review and North American Review's annual poetry awards. Inside you'll also find three color illustrations by Dorota Lagida-Ostling. Dig, bury, seed, unearth, and reap. Bring a shovel.

"The beautiful poems in Elizabeth Joy Levinson's Running Aground do not blink. They swim open eyed into the land of hard, sand-scrubbed love and loneliness and pain. And they speak for us girls so rarely seen in poems, difficult, poor, wild sea girls. These are poems of strong images and haunting lines, truth poems, father poems, ocean poems. It is a collection I will read and re-read again and again." -Leigh Camacho Rourks, author of Moon Trees and Other Orphans"Elizbeth Joy Levinson's Running Aground navigates us through ports of poverty, sea creatures, Florida & the dangers of opening one's mouth & speaking (or not). Thankfully, Levinson does speak out in these poems full of deft lyricism, pacing & powerful metaphors. She guides us through moments of peril like a jellyfish coming too close & the heartache in seeing a father run aground. These poems fuse images & language of land & sea, of ships & cars packed w/suitcases, of mermaids & girls reaching out w/fingers "trying/ to hold everything/ at once." With Levinson as our captain, the poems in Running Aground will steadily sail on & steer our way through troubled waters & time." -Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the Crown, winner of the 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize

And isn't the story of our lives the story of our women, the mythology we have lived and been bequeathed? Anna Mae Perillo's INHERITANCE OF COURAGE AND FEAR speaks, sings through memory and desire. Duality is here in these poems, excavated and resolved. She asks, what are we if not the humble and fierce products of some other country within our own? And what of the tension that lies in the answer, which is the reason for who we are and what we do, and, most importantly, what we leave in our wake. This collection is a beautiful remembrance and conjuring of what passes through us, and what brings us to our political and intimate moments, as alive as it is elegiac. Remember, it whispers, and we do. -VANESSA JIMENEZ GABB, author of Images for Radical Politics, Midnight Blue and Weekend Poems.If you think of a chapbook as a small book, you're going to have to adjust your judgement here. Anna Mae Perillo has sculpted a book that never remains personal because she introduces the individuals in her poems and then the reader to their connection with a much bigger world. Enter here and see how big a chapbook can get. -FRAN QUINN, author of A Horse of Blue Ink, co-author of Sound Ideas and the recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Prize.Anna Mae Perillo has created a "beautiful nest" of family and friends engaging each other and the world, celebrating victories, sharing worries. Her essential nature is to bloom: "To claw up through the dense soil/ To meet the sun," being present in each moment. -MYRA SHAPIRO, author of 12 Floors Above the Earth, I'll See you Thursday, and Four Sublets. Her poem "These are the Pearls" appeared in the New Yorker, July, 2019. She serves on the Board of Directors of Poets House.

In reading Joseph Hamel's poetry, you begin a walk down a familiar street and end up taking a turn you never have before or through a forest path that you thought you knew but now everything looks more marvelous and more frightful. And you take this walk with someone you care about; and you take this walk with yourself. A beautiful world surrounds with a "blue river" and "falling dark," with the "first alarm of autumn" and "spiders' webs" so full of grief and joy that these poems stun you with their love of being alive, and greet you on a "broken street" and dare to reveal heart and spine in an all too human voice knowing there is no arrival and departure, just the time we're on the road with each other and with ourselves. These poems revel in the "metal pail sound of a milk chute" or "fire inside the frost," at the same time that they seek a solitude so wonderful because it hurts. These poems confide to each other like the constant travelers in the novels of Thomas Bernhard, who carefully shape their words as they try to say the most heartfelt things a human can bear. These poems rise out of deep furrows cut by the words of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and seek to carry us into light no matter how heavy our burden. -John R. Harvey, playwright and poet, author of Rot and Night of the Giant

Working Woman Poetry by Claire L. Frankel is a delightful collection that asks the reader to ponder "What is a working woman's life?" Frankel invites the reader to travel through a landscape of emotions and circumstances in this brilliant new book. -Leah Huete de Maines

This is What was Next is a collection of contemporary poetry that binds a profound love and grief for the natural world with considerations of atheism, exploring and ultimately celebrating the freedom and healing to be found in self-honesty. McKay delights in sudden leaps between hallucinatory lyricism and meticulously patterned language games; between the starkly personal and tongue-and-cheek musings of artistic self-promotion.

It was my good fortune to work with Constance Alexander through the Kentucky Voices program at Horse Cave Theatre during the development of The Way Home. In this compelling piece, Constance combines a journalist's power of observation with a poet's use of language-and her own light heart-to skillfully create characters and situations dealing with tough end of life issues. A standing ovation for Constance for this script, and for her use of theatre as a forum to stimulate conversations on a challenging topic. -Liz Fentress, playwrightCancer. A simple word that echoed through my bones like an earthquake. And then the aftershock-I have no insurance. Through surgery and chemo, the bills piling up, at times I felt so lost. But not alone. When I think back to that time, a line from The Way Home shines like a beacon-There are people along the way who say, "Come this way. There are ways through all this." Constance Alexander is one of those people along the way. Her spoken word opera is a gift to be performed not only by professional actors, but by friends reaching out to friends, by strangers reaching out to strangers, by communities reaching out to reassure, to comfort, to guide us all home. I cannot express the depth of my gratitude. -Judy Sizemore, Survivor and Poet

If you want to know in many ways what coal mining felt like years ago, you will read Ben Campbell's clear, brilliant, and informative DARKER STILL. -John McKernan, author of Resurrection of the Dust

The Invisible Suitcase, Elaine Olund's debut collection, presents the poet's world using the deft brushstrokes of the artist she also is. "There's a word for everything', Olund tells us in one of several short poems exploring botanical terms; "this one means 'grow toward light.'" This book shimmers with the light of life all around us. Whether the poet's light shines on the image of wilting carnations-"So white. Dirty-edged though, like snow / charcoaled with car exhaust"-or on a mother who is "gray-tired/lost in a haze of Parliament smoke", these poems are rendered in full color, with images both fully themselves and bright windows into the human experience. -Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate, 2016-2018Elaine Olund's debut poetry collection, The Invisible Suitcase, twines around roots, growing towards the light, and letting go. Memory's roots burrow deep as the tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike "plunge..." her "...into darkness." Olund uses marcescence, the botanical process of holding on to old foliage, thwarting new growth, as a metaphorical warning. The speaker mourns loss while cutting into a strawberry, "slicing these little hearts wide open." Copper, a favorite color, morphs into a penny rolling out of reach, like a lover "no longer worth reaching for." Finally, releasing memories too tightly held allows the speaker to make a "Packing list for a new life," as "into the invisible suitcase, breath folded/neat as a silk scarf." -Ellen Austin-Li, Author of Firefly, Finishing Line Press, 2019For me a good poem is either a sort of controlled explosion or a journey. Olund has both kinds of poems in this collection. Some, like "Watching Carnations Wilt," have to be reread, danced with, as they slowly give up their secrets. Sharp images rise up, sink, and then re-surface. The Invisible Suitcase will take you to deep and real places and when you return to your life and the room and the book in your hands, everything is familiar, but richer and realer-strawberries are cut and hearts, bleeding. -Howard Wells, Editor & Book Developer

Karol Nielsen's new book sees the poet masterfully engaging with the question of how to define and communicate one's place in a complex world, speaking volumes about the society she inhabits. Nielsen, who is also an acclaimed author of two memoirs, paints vivid scenes that are as easy to visualize as they are suggestive and multilayered, at once real and metaphorical. Full of soul-searching, heartbreak, and the triumph of insight, this moving collection guides its readers through a personal journey full of historical resonance yet fully present in the here-and-now. -Anton Yakovlev, author of the chapbook Chronos Dines Alone, winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize 2018Karol Nielsen's collection carries the indelible grief of war and its many faces "like a prison tattoo." Her urban poems are populated by her father, neighbors, lovers, famous actors, and people she encounters on the New York City streets. Striking and unforgettable, the war stories seep into her poems. The distant wars of Vietnam and Afghanistan permeate the wars of everyday life. From this hopelessness, tender love poems rise like "small bursts of color/then full, fat blooms." -Claudia Serea, author of Twoxism

Sliver of Change is a debut collection of twenty-four poems by Marianne Brems. The collection revolves around the theme of transformations, small ones, big ones, frightening ones, peaceful ones that occur at every moment. Her vignettes of everyday life explore quirks of human nature as well as curious aspects of the physical world. Author Audrey Kalman says "These are pieces that appear quotidian but reveal deeper truths. You'll want to read them more than once to connect with the power and emotion lurking under their surfaces."

Here is a poet who dares to venture beyond the familiar terrain of shadows and regret, stepping free instead into the dangerous territory of radiance. But Beth Kress is no blind optimist. She focuses her lens on the loss of her brother and the bullet-riddled streets of Sarajevo as steadily as she does on the ordinary, gorgeous banalities of motherhood, friendship, and family. Her poems are lustily generous, issuing an urgent invitation to her reader - in sorrow as well as happiness, or simply in repose - to rejoice with her. -Frannie Lindsay, author of If Mercy and Our VanishingIn Taking Notes, Beth Kress pays close and loving attention to the narrative details of family history and to her own. She often writes poems of endings and beginnings, as early in the book "The Trunk" imagines her ancestors' painful departure from England, their new life and discoveries in America. Later, she narrates her own transitions with humor, honesty and celebration. She has a gift for the telling detail: the single tin mailbox listing slightly, as seen by a lonely young mother in "On Simonton Road;" the stranger in "Going Down," who falls in the subway: a knapsack like that could break your heart. "What I Brought to Provincetown" could be an index and guide to this whole moving book. Kress didn't bring a compass there, but she did indeed bring a heart. -Susan Donnelly, author of Capture the Flag and The Finding DayBeth Kress's poems embrace us in the sweep of their celebration. In clear and fluent language she plumbs inherited experience: the gesture of hands, the flavor of childhood. Reading this collection feels like walking with a friend. Her lines can call up the bud of a baby's mouth, or stretch back miles and generations. In and through them all runs that sense of the current that connects us, tidal, overwhelming. These poems, like the author's memories, hover beside us in kitchens or countrysides, "dusting off their flour-coated hands/across the decades." They pull us in, "the distance between us/much thinner than we thought." -Jessie Brown, author of Lucky and What We Don't Know We Know

"Amid the many delicious feasts contained in Full Mouth-ranging from caviar and oysters to donuts and dumplings-you'll find the "sweet improbable globes" of oranges, and the batter of funnel cakes wiggling "across a lake of boiling oil," expansive descriptions that insist on the transcendent experience that food can offer us. And what Eddy offers us here is a globe-trotting, memory-packed, omnivorous bounty of poems that interrogate appetite in all its forms. Through the full-mouth music of Eddy's language, this book explores family, intimacy, what nourishes and sates, and what it truly means to break bread." -Matt Donovan, author of two collections of poetry-Vellum (Mariner, 2007) and the chapbook Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press, 2017)-as well as the collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press, 2016). He is Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College.

Janet McMillan Rives shares her poetry inspired by decades spent in the prairie states of the American Midwest. Join her as she drives through the Sandhills of Nebraska enjoying lovely vistas and subtle wildflowers. Become a part of the lush green Iowa cornfields which cover the state from river to river, the Missouri to the Mississippi. Discover the region's countryside, small towns, and people who reside in these poems. Included in this collection are poems which garnered prizes from both the Iowa Poetry Association and the Arizona State Poetry Society as well as other poems published in national and regional journals.