Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Lesley Clinton's Calling the Garden from the Grave explores our restless human yearnings and spiritual endurance. Pieces in this collection have won awards from the Poetry Society of Texas, Press Women of Texas, and the Houston Poetry Fest. Settings as vast as the West Texas desert and intimate as a one-bedroom apartment invite the reader to both adventure and contemplation. In these pages, the reader meets trailblazers and homebodies, mothers and daughters, lovers and loners, the famed and the obscure. Each wrestles in some way with a God-given calling. Each struggles to bloom in soil made dry by quotidian loss or past transgressions. Clinton offers a sacramental view of the world informed by her Catholic faith. No small grace goes unseen in these poems; each tiny sacrifice and moment of growth is honored. This collection brings God's numinous, intangible space of fortitude and renewal into the abundant, greening poetry garden.

The poems of Everything reaches out to everything else explore the nature of our world now and the interconnectedness of all life. Poems are set in the older urban neighborhoods of Los Angeles which are bounded by the LA River that was thwarted and yet is reclaiming itself. These poems capture longings, fears, and the beauty of the moment, all set among the anxiety of living now. This chapbook Includes the poem, Atwater, winner of the Crossing Boundaries Award for Innovative and Experimental Writing from International Quarterly.

In linked haikus, Diane Vreuls captures events in her outer and inner landscape during a passing season. Starting with the close at hand, ("the first red leaf / sets fire to the hedges"), she moves to the larger world in a quick progression from sight to insight. Daft and deft, FALL is a delight: a small book with a large heart.

Amanda Gomez's Wasting Disease is the antithesis of the vajazzled pussies of which she writes. The collection's poems strip away social constructs, to expose naked pain. Little girls disintegrate like diseased starfish. The Jets rape Anita because she's a brown girl. A dreamer performs her mother's autopsy, clearing out the torso to make a maternal space for herself. Lips become scissors. And love is venomous. Gomez takes us to the brink of confusion, rage, fear, abandonment, despair-the horrors of a people in steep decline-and holds us on the precipice with a final line of disconcerting commentary, a new kind of nakedness ... a lesson in scars. Read the collection. See us our worst. Hope for something better. -Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher of Writers ResistWhat is language in the hands of a poet? Should it yield smoothness, a polished and easy finish? That would be too easy. In the poetry of Amanda Gomez, language is above all restored to its true function, so we might trust it again and give it the proper respect- for its capacity to expand rather than merely limit experience, for its ability to render visible rather than subdue or eclipse. If an autopsy is meant to see into the flayed body, poetry is meant to lovingly return it to itself. "Please, don't take me for tragic," she asks; for this is a poet brave enough to "wear the galaxy like a dress." -Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser and The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis"Amanda Gomez spares no one and no thing in her brilliant and sharp debut, Wasting Disease. 'I guess what I am saying is, every girl / learns to disintegrate' she tells us, not in resignation but in rage. This is a book of so many things-yes, rage, but there is so much more. Gomez writes 'Everywhere I stare my shadow is running.' And haven't we all known that place? That place of self-loathing and displacement? In Wasting Disease, Gomez sticks her hands deep in the mud to pull out all the things we have buried, not to shame us, but to ask "who made us feel this way?" The fingers point in complicated directions-to gender, to race, to colonization, to language, to ourselves-but make no mistake: Wasting Disease is not a book asking you to come clean. Rather, it begs you to dance in all the facets of your humanity, light and dark." -Nishat Ahmed, Author of Field Guide for End Days and Brown Boy

"Against the horrors of history, these poems seek to give urgent voice to the women so often erased from the record. In Leibowitz's imagination, time periods collapse; the Annunciation or the trial of Artemisia Gentileschi have all the freshness and verve of today. 'Teach me what to do with these pink obligations,' she asks in a poem. In the truest sense of ecphrasis, Leibowitz speaks out of these pictures to the fragility and endurance of faith and of art. -Richie Hofmann, PhD, Pushcart Prize recipient and author of Second Empire (2015)"As lush in its imagery as it is uniquely precise, HYPATIA AT THE MUSEUM grants new agency to the archetypal maiden. These intricately-wrought poems glimmer, swell, and burst with talent. M.G. Leibowitz has given us all a true gift." -Leslie Sainz, 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist

Light is haunting. It illuminates and takes away, exposing the Louisiana coast and its disappearance, highlighting childhood memories, trying to make sense of death, addiction, navigating guilt, and remembrance. The loss becomes both personal and national with the loss of so many African Americans at the hands of police and the importance of "say his( her, their) name" made popular by the Black Lives Matter movement. The poem "Exile" focuses on the loss of Micheal Brown and the chaos and rage and injustice felt by the nation, "be island, be glass, be a man with his hands up," in which the see the grand possibility of a life with the simply gesture of innocence in the description of hands raised above your head. In the poem titled "Shots into Day", we dream of a boy becoming something new, becoming the sky, a bird, or better yet bullet proof. Loss and grief take its last turn with the weaving of an unexpected death of a female friend in a car accident and the murder of the young woman Mickey Shunick. The deaths of these women push us to reexamine our place as a woman in society and the violence and beauty of the female body. We see how women just fade into night, a metaphor for societies perception, disposable and sexualized, as though woman are "undetectable, untraceable, unseen" a line from"Before Dusk." Evoking Frank Bidart's famous piece "Ellen West", the poem titled "Carol Anne Boone" shows us how we have become too occupied with the male story, evidence of the increased popularity of new serial killer dramas on Netflix. The poem titled "Carol Anne Boone" shows a possibility of her perspective and voice that was swallowed up from public view. We are then lead to tales of the narrators sexualization as a young child in poem titled "Blue Nude," where we imagine the female body as anything, "bird, bunny, anything for body". These deaths evoke a death of the narrator and create a sexual reawakening and new found love. Love becomes reimagined. We live a short abusive relationship in poems titled "Artifacts," "Codependency" and "Roadkill," where we feel the strains of controlled love and the release of finding new love in poems titled "Soft Beginnings." Love then appears all around. C.D. Wright's famous collection Deep Step Come Shining repeats the word love. In the poem titled "Stripmall for C.D. Wright" differentiates love, " bullet love" , "Elvis love", "bird love". Love of all kinds surrounds us and the collection ends with two erasures one of a page from Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and the other of Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. In the end, we have reemerged with a new love: love of loss, love of grief, and love of new, and are left to hold on and let go to become one with light and sheen.

Rick Henry's little novel, Colleen's Count, Wednesday, August 16th, 1933, has a Joycean air and ear to it, a lightness in its depth, but only if Joyce had been a feminist living in the Adirondacks in the Depression era 30's. The title character is an Everywoman whose spirit, strength, and humanity ring true. Reading Colleen is like finding some precious object buried in rich mulch. -Stuart BartowRick Henry's short novel is a tour de force about women's lives in the Adirondacks in the 1920s and early 30s. Ostensibly about cars, it gradually reveals itself to be about those entwined eternal verities: sex, death and money. (And cars. And movies). Though slim, the book successfully brings to life an entire town, and era, as seen through the eyes of one woman, Colleen O'Shea Pierce, going about her day in 1933; in the process, she reveals herself to be far more Molly than Leopold Bloom. The book stays with you, troubling and disturbing, raising questions with no clear answers, much like life itself, -Barbara Ungar

A young married couple is surprised by an unexpected pregnancy. To wrestle with the onset of a multitude of wavering emotions, author Johanna DeBiase begins writing poetry. As the seasons change from winter to spring to summer to fall, she experiences the joys, fears and mysteries of pregnancy and finally, childbirth. She collects her poems together into an artful chapbook titled appropriately, Gestation. Gestation reflects the nature of creation in both art, nature and humanity. Through these poems we discover the struggle for acceptance, the joy of surrender, the anticipation of the unknown and the bliss of the culmination of waiting to finally birth your creation into the world.

Poems of growing up and growing older, holding on and letting go, paying tribute while always paying attention to the sidewalk cracks and the small, itchy places.Memories, "[g]one like steam from the glass," yet recaptured in Merrill Oliver Douglas's calm, level gaze. These quiet, uncompromising accounts are both more loving and more revealing for their refusal of sentiment. Funny, rueful, opening on unexpected depths, but above all accepting-her poems celebrate "the everyday weather of home." -Stephanie Strickland, author of How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected and Ringing the ChangesMerrill Oliver Douglas' Parking Meters into Mermaids is rich with transformation: daughter to mother, body to spirit, domestic to global. "Summer, in My Early Twenties," includes the lines, "Nights when the t-shirt stuck to my back, / and I could feel the hairs sprout on my legs, / why didn't some grayer, fatter woman // sit me down and say, 'Sweetie, this isn't your life. / This is weather.'" "Harvest" describes a pepper's unlikely winter bloom as "a small fruit, gnarled // as a toothless gnome." The poem abruptly shifts: "We won't eat it. / It's not food we're after, // just this off-kilter, out-of- / proportion pleasure of seeing / kinked, bare bones give birth." Each poem in this collection shimmers with off-kilter, out-of-proportion pleasure. -Suzanne Cleary, author of Beauty Mark (2013) and Crude Angel (2018), both from BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

A collection of poems focusing on the narrator's various interpersonal relationships, hardships, and the gradual realization of themselves as an autonomous and independent being. The One In Which Bambi Tells Me To Get A Life also meditates on personal, political, and global issues such as mental health (i.e. depression & anxiety), sexual abuse, the #metoo movement, and existential isolation.

A Chapbook of lyrical poems that speak to the universal human experience of loss. This collection of poems draw on the natural world to find words and images that evoke and express the exquisite and persistent experience of grief, the twin sister of profound love, whether it comes as a result of death, adoption, rejection, suicide, miscarriage, or a myriad of other different kinds of separation.

"This is all a year is" Carriger tells us and then embarks on a collection of poems that deftly encompass and reflect upon the moments that comprise our lives. From a story of Samuel Morse to the image of a modern boy staying after class to soak up the attention of a teacher, she places historical events next to modern pieces and invites us to think not only of our own lives but of what time has meant to others because "[e]verything goes in time". This collection gives voice to those often left voiceless, like Sarah and Delilah from the Old Testament, Christine Keeler, Angela de Foligno, and Persephone who confesses, "The terrible truth of the underworld / is that it is not terrible at all." These poems are "Suspension bridges [that] grow out like climbing vines" inviting us to marvel at what holds us all together during our time Deep Inside that Rounded World. -Jamie Lynn Heller, author of Domesticated; Poetry From Around the House (Finishing Line Press) and Buried in the Suburbs, a 2019 Kansas Notable Book of the Year (Woodley Press)Shannon Carriger writes with empathy and eloquence of the "inevitable wreckage" of time, history, and war; she tenderly exposes hearts "bruised or brushed" by love, fear, and regret. Deep Inside that Rounded World is memorable, nuanced, fresh, stunning. -Linda M. Lewis, author of Ensemble: Poems (Spartan Press) and Professor Emerita of English, Bethany CollegeThe poems in Shannon Carriger's debut collection Deep Inside that Rounded World often suture history to a single, human life-one left out of our more public, official narratives. We aren't looking closely enough at the world-not at our shared pasts, not at the present, and certainly not the way the poet does in these sharp, impressively referential poems, ranging from Shoichi Yokoi, to Hannah Duston, to Persephone. In one stunning poem from the collection the public views a 1964 photograph of Marianne Faithful and merely perceives the singer "as a cold, closed thing," missing entirely "...a refraction of the light / above and within...". These poems follow the light no matter how it bends, or through what stubborn materials. They do not flinch. -Ben Cartwright, author of After Our Departure (Sage Hill Press) and The Meanest Things Pick Clean (Floating Bridge Press)

The legend of an American icon gets real in a riveting collection of poems that peels back the layers of the Amelia Earhart mystique. You may know the ending, but the moments in Alchemy are not revealed through the lens of disappearance; each event is examined for its own value in this biography unlike any other. Born into a man's world, Amelia bucks the role set before her and all American women in the early 1900s. Instantly surrounded by the competing philosophies of her parents and grandparents, she works hard and plays hard, never shying away from a task or adventure deemed "too masculine." In a time when girls are expected to wear dresses and play tea party, Amelia learns to shoot guns and play football. As a young woman in 1918, she becomes part of the war effort, moving to Canada to work in a military hospital where she is infected by the flu pandemic. During a period of financial and personal uncertainty, she falls in love with the burgeoning field of flight, and never looks back. With grit and gumption she turns her dreams into an extraordinary career and lifestyle, proving that there is no ordinary. Amelia doggedly pursues the many firsts set before that original generation of pilots, breaking one aviation record after another, until her luck runs out. Told in a combination of free verse and form poetry, Alchemy is a true story of female empowerment, ambition, and loss. Both bold and haunting, it reveals the essential Earhart, a woman driven by detriments and dreams. Alchemy features a detailed preface that sets the historical context and provides little known facts about Earhart's life. Thoroughly researched and historically accurate - it's poetic storytelling at its best.

Poet-Literary Translator, Eveline L. Kanes, listened to other voices as she found and added her own. Traveling Through describes her long life's journey in a changing world.

In her first collection of published poems, Ready or Not, Robin Wright explores the universal theme of unexpected life events through images and language related to relationships, love, loss, death, and dementia. This collection begins with "Fringe," a poem about teenage loneliness and isolation. Several poems about romantic relationships follow, including "Renters," a poem about a marriage starting out differently than expected but leaving the reader with hope.Other poems ignite the emotions of relationships lost. Several lead the reader through the narrator's frame of mind and feelings during and after a break-up. "What This Woman Wants," centers on a woman's needs from her partner and is a nod to Kim Addonizio's "What Do Women Want?"The collection then segues into poems about the loss of beloved friends and a beloved uncle, taking the reader into the darkness of grief. "Like This" focuses on a different kind of loss and revolves on what we are willing to do or not do as a society. The final poem features a loved one struggling with dementia as witnessed by the narrator.Wright uses accessible language and uses images that resonate with others to make a human connection."Like This" was a finalist in Poetry Matters Spring Robinson/Mahogany Red Literary Prize. The poems in this collection have previously appeared in the following: Amarillo Bay; Ariel Chart; Foliate Oak Literary Magazine; Indiana Voice Journal; Lost River Literary Magazine; Muddy River Poetry Review; Nature Writing; Peacock Journal; Rat's Ass Review; See Spot Run; Terror House Magazine; Zygote in My Coffee; Time Present, Time Past, the University of Southern Indiana's 50th anniversary anthology.

In poems as vivid as they are precise, S.J. Stephens reckons boldly with the difficult world and-in equal measure-with what is difficult in herself. Again and again she trains on self and other (and trees and birds and bees and weeds) a loving attention no less exacting for its affection. This work is feminist in its insistence on telling the truth from an embodied female perspective, even when the truth is that she has internalized a "shame so shrill it makes [her] shudder." Sometimes these poems tell their hard truth directly to those who endanger the speaker's capacity for liberty and self regard. Sometimes they speak to the natural world, finding echoes of the inner life in outer scenes: hunger, danger, love. Often the speaker seems to talk to the speaker, counseling herself to keep seeing, keep saying what's true for the sake of her own wellbeing and for the good of us all. Always these poems speak to a reader ready to train her gaze, too, on what's beautiful and frightening, frustrating and heartening. While Stephens' poems offer no compromise, they certainly offer, in poem after poem, plenty of consolation. "[A] raw and bloody fear rises in me," she tells us "but there is also wild, wild joy." -Melissa Crowe, author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press)These are elegant, surprising poems. The speaker longs to find something sacred in the branches, in the Ohio River, in the Salty Dog Café, and in language. There is such a deep need to connect despite violence, despite "a world that picks at...souls like scavenger birds feasting," because in each Laurel there could be a "beating heart." Stephens' voice is muscular and full of truth, and I am so lucky to have come to know it. A beautiful, powerful collection. -Kelly Moffett, author of Bird Blind and A Thousand WingsThrough Stephens's work, we realize the questions that are buried deep within our subconscious-questions like: am I a true feminist or am I just giving the impression that I am a feminist without truly living it? "I wear the impression of Cinderella and her feminist rant / like an evening gown." She takes us on a journey through the #metoo movement and whittles the essence of family into concrete images we understand at a gut level: "Even though the love lies on the floor / with sawdust and drops of paint / and years of words stick in the cracks of wood paneling". Stephens possesses an unusual talent for the art of the sestina, and she brings us a new consciousness of the "childless mother"-that there are women who are mothers but have not had the opportunity to have children, and this is a fresh take on feminism. Stephens's work is timeless and remains with the reader long after they close the book. -Megan D. Henson, author of What Pain Does

Poems in An Envelope Waiting by Lisa Roullard explore the world of mail: sometimes the poet escapes into it, sometimes the mailman from it. Themes of waiting and dating also surface and postage stamps capture first dates in Washington State. In 2013 poems from this collection placed first in the Utah Original Writing Competition.

The poems in Working Hypothesis celebrate curiosity. They revel in the discoveries of Natural Science as well as the hoaxes and scientific jokes that litter our history of knowing. These are the product of Charles Malone's rural upbringing and connection to the natural world, his family's passed-down bookishness, and his mother's work as a chemist. Poems like "Beneficial Insects" and "Papilio Ecclipses" look to the intersections of these ideas with our most intimate personal relationships. The poem "About the River" comes from Malone's work using poetry writing in the community to talk about the history of the Cuyahoga River. These pieces balance intellectual searching with domestic moments of childhood, marriage, and the making of a home.Amid his wonder for the natural world, Malone's poems also grow from doubt. We have painted butterfly's wings to claim a new species, imagined animals that burst from the seeds of plants, and written of man-eating trees in the jungle of Madagascar. We have lied to and amused ourselves. We have made mistakes. "Adecula Ridiculi" considers the metaphors offered by a typo that bred a fake history of a temple constructed to mock Hannibal's failed siege of Rome. "Jokes of Nature / Jokes of Knowledge" and "Truthfully" catalog a cabinet of curiosities in the history of Natural Science, and "The Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar" imagines that lie as something akin to the way an older sibling might mislead a younger one.The final section of the book, "Experiments & Tricks" draws from Robert J. Brown's 333 Science Tricks & Experiments. Brown's 1984 book offers up an abundance of ideas to bring science into the home. This infusion of metaphor and vocabulary invites us to consider the simple act of counting the seconds between lightning and thunder differently in "How Far the Storm?" This poem connects to the history of Malone's home town, Kent, Ohio, and the shootings on the campus in 1970. He writes, "We can count the seconds between / explosions. / We can feel them in our teeth. / Even as one voice says / a storm is coming, another says it isn't." Other experiments inspire "Mirror Tricks," "Smoke from the Fingertips," and "Ghost Light." In all, these poems encourage us all to follow our questions and our doubts. They invite us into overservation and to be childlike in embracing our curiosity.

Sky gone is an articulate examination of the loss of a parent through the lens of metaphor. It moves throughout the year following a father's death. Using the disappearance of the sky as a metaphor, the author compares grief to the world of nature in chaos, and its substantive lack of normalcy, until a return to some new semblance of living is possible.

Barbara Flug Colin has published poems, essays and interviews in art, literary and teaching magazines and anthologies such as Art Now, Arts Magazine, New York Art Journal, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, New Observations, Frigate, Third Mind, Making a Difference, Cerise Press, Evergreen Review, DIAGRAM. Essays received: Teachers and Writers' 2012 Bechtel Prize; Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2013; finalist in 2014 Diagram/New Michigan Essay contest. She teaches a poetry-writing program she created in 1991 for the Henry Viscardi School, a state supported elementary and high school for severely physically disabled students in Albertson, New York.

These poems inventively blur the line between lyric and broadside, confronting an increasingly hostile world with poignancy, wry humor, and a sense of the surreal.

These poems may possibly help you get through the dark night of the soul, as they were written there by a woman in long-term sobriety, a therapist, whose faith is tested by the impending death of a spouse during a perilous time for our democracy. Like a guidebook to overcoming personal and societal challenges, these poems are how a poet pulls their self up by their bootstraps, and speaks back to injustice with mercy, truth and courage, reaching out to activists everywhere.