Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Peace Maps explores real and imaginary terrain at the intersection of ecology and devastation. From Chaco Canyon to Chernobyl, Beirut to Zuma, the poet excavates artifacts and elements to map themes of love, loss, motherhood, and healing. Sensory natural images take root and grow beneath daily lives-offering hope, heart, and glimmers of peace.The poet Karen Lewis engages with the environment in ways that probe the current moment where reality touches imagination. Poems connect her personal journeys through love, loss, motherhood, and solitude with a complicated terrain of war, peace, and places in-between. In this era of increasing globalization, these poems argue for particular connections to particular places. "Desolation Wilderness" brings readers to a mountain region accessed only by foot. "Sian Ka'an Biosphere" (a ghazal) excavates tons of ocean plastics washing ashore. "Painted Cave" traces a new mother's connections with the unceded indigenous land where she lives, her own ancestors, her husband's war trauma, and her newborn infant. "Sappho's Island" celebrates silences, spaces and the concept of erasure. "Prayer Beads" is a praise-song for Baghdad, a city that is the cradle of civilization and a contemporary war zone. Because poetry cannot always fit into lines, "Peace Summit" creates a visual ascent to a place of balance and duality. "Tunis" celebrates the pulse of women demonstrating during the Jasmine Revolution, while "Place of Echoes" deciphers what remains of a ruined Mayan temple.As a collection of poetic cartography-and a reflection of how one woman navigates a privileged life through an often-murky lens-Peace Maps faces the future without easy answers. The poems here invite readers to risk their own imaginative journeys through whatever challenging times they may face, wherever in the world they may be.

A collection of fabulist poetry inspired by experiences as a part of the queer community and the natural world.

The Unsaid Words is a small collection of poems about life with chronic pain. Themes of despair, struggle, and, ultimately, hope, run through the book. The poems encourage readers to acknowledge the emotional and mental struggles that accompany chronic physical pain. The book is a space to mourn these effects on one's life, as well as a message of solidarity and hope for those who suffer.

Grief, joy, sorrow. Love, loss, healing: the highs and lows of the human soul. Marybeth Cohowicz draws upon personal emotions, and creatively marries them with nature metaphors and imagery while addressing the trials of life. Many orthodox writers would struggle with a full length book to reach the depths Marybeth can take a reader in just 26 poems. Her poetry is poignant, and this first publication will turn you inside out and show you what you're made of!

Covering the full and rich experiences of a woman's life, this collection includes poems that were nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net awards. Some poems were also included in exhibitions, such as the Poetry Leaves exhibit in Waterford, Michigan. The poem "Curves" was performed on stage at the Turner Ballroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by professional actresses in an event in support of women and girls with eating disorders. Divided into sections, the poems lead the reader through the full experience of a romantic relationship, from attraction to devastation. Other poems express the experience of birth, both through being a mother and being a writer. Two poems intensely immerse the reader into what it's like to have breast cancer. The interaction with the earth is included too, in a section on nature, both outside in the world and inside the soul. Whether the poems are the bright burst of haiku, or the longer prose poem journey from teenage angst to old age, there will be echoes of familiarity and resonance for every reader.

It always comes back to this. A writer sets out to tell one story, and only when its finished, discovers it's another story entirely. Such is this collection of bird poems written by Kate McCarroll Moore. The poems collected here are stitched together with tenderness, regret, grief, and hope, telling the story of a father-daughter relationship expressed through a shared love of birds.

Every summer, mayflies swarm the shores of Lake St. Clair for a week's time, before their bodies dry up and scatter like ashes. Set inside the blue-collar automotive town of Windsor, Ontario, Mayflies traces the trajectory of adolescence into adulthood: A personal inventory of "glass-specked streets and shuttered storefronts" and "open wounds and eyesores" that follows in the wake of the 2008 recession. Cassandra Caverhill captures urban decline and imagines the road ahead as pockmarked and pot-holed, with opportunities dissolving beneath the weight of semitrucks.These narrative poems explore how place colors possibility and affects relationship; how the absence of feeling is filled by obliteration. Using sharp textural images and a keen self-awareness, the poet weaves her own struggles with Windsor's, chronicling the city's descent as though it were a loved one lost.

Jenica Lodde's debut collection of poems is a contemplative ode to sorrow. If night had a song it would be low and quiet, soft enough to let you dream, touched by just enough light to remind you of the morning. If night had a voice it would speak like these poems, gentle reminders that there is beauty in the shadows. Written as a rebellion against the stigma that tries to silence the voices of internal suffering, these meditations on the inner landscape cut right to the core of what it means to struggle and survive, to "rise up from the center, a dome of mist."

In her third chapbook, poet Roberta Schultz examines those people, places, and experiences we reach for in darkness. Filtered through the lens of loss, these touchstones rub indelible gold into our outstretched hands, refusing to lose their shine with time.

Consider Some Flowers presents several dualities: writer and glass artisan, death and life, reality and make-believe. This collection focuses on the narrator's grief after the death of her beloved and finding various ways to mourn. As the narrative continues, the narrator finds comfort in creating assorted plant species out of glass. The concept of preserving life in intricate detail through glass flowers fascinates the narrator and allows her to explore the degrees of loss by questioning the objectives of art.Just as the narrator experiences the five stages of grief, each flower goes through stages to be completed-from studying the anatomy of each living plant to admiring the finished piece. Reliving the events before death and the artistic process become intertwined as time goes on. These glass plants are able to live forever unlike their real counterparts. Sustaining a life, even one as simple as a plant, allows the narrator to feel a sense of control. As the roots of her glass flowers sometimes end abruptly so does life. But life can't exist without death and as the narrator exclaims, surrounded by her glass garden, she misses the beauty in wilting. In the fragility of glass, the narrator comes to understand the fragility of life and her own grief.This collection recounts Boling's own experience with grief while drawing inspiration from the famed "Glass Flowers," officially the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, on permanent exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and their creators, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

Through engagement with myths old and new, Smiling with Teeth tells of mothers & witches, lost men & the creatures they become. Poems explore the dark places that exist unspoken within families and the delicate balance kept by this restraint. Oftentimes a maze with false ends, the narration aches of love, loss, and longing, while staying sharp in its point, which is returned to time and time again: we owe a debt to the mothers before us-beauty, pain, loyalty, in equal share.

Hiromi Yoshida's debut poetry chapbook, Icarus Burning, offers a tantalizing glimpse into the post-9/11 world of fallen icons, failed hook-ups, and burning pianos. Out of this ash heap, Icarus is resurrected as the signifier of fluctuating desire-"waxing toward the boiling point on the Hudson horizon." The American psyche's Ground Zero museum scintillates, bursting open to showcase Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Patty Hearst, Norman Bates, Rosa Parks, and the Virgin Mary. They are the iconographic phantasmagoria presiding over the "nymphomaniacal caravan" of New York City's subway commuters. Hiromi Yoshida's radical lyricism gives them all poetic justice, and more.

Dust to Dust is a reflection upon the changes that come with time and the complexity of nostalgia. Bridget Dolan explores her relationship with nature and the connection it has with her mental illness. She remembers planting tomatoes in the backyard with her mother and the way life seemed to be easier before she became an adult, before she got sick and had to learn a new way to live.

Another Troy features the recently discovered poetry of an American teenager, Joan Wehlen Morrison. We witness how she matures as a poet and historian from 1938-1944. Joan's poetry tells a unique - and true - story as she loses her innocence due to the impending war and its violent arrival. Along the way she dates a number of boys, reflects on politics and art, and ends up falling in love with the man who would become her husband. Offering us more than mere historical color, in her verse Joan muses on literature, nature, God, the meaning of life, romance, history, and World War II. This vivid account of a real American girl's lived experiences during the Great Depression and the start of World War II provides vital access to how poetry becomes a conduit for understanding historical events as they happen. In her papers found after her death-diaries, notebooks, and the jewels of the collection, her poetry-Joan's perspective demonstrates how, despite an underprivileged background financially, she managed to thrive surrounded by books, socialist political leanings, and artistic talk. Inspired by the literature she read, the young Joan writes verse in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling. Later her favorite poets are A. E. Housman, John Donne, and Shakespeare. The title of this volume comes from Joan's passion for classical literature and the connections she makes between her present moment and those of antiquity. She remains a girl, able to make fun of herself, despite an ability to see deeply into things. Classical literature gives her sustenance in the darkest days of World War II. And Joan never loses her ability to feel compassion, even for the so-called enemy. These poems, sent as it were, in a time capsule to our moment today, remind us how the written word remains a means for hope for those in emotional extremity-from passionate love to dire political circumstances-both in terms of what one can read and what one can write.

Earth, My Witness is a collection that chronicles one woman's journey to reconcile her dysfunctional childhood. Poems take readers through stages of grief, awareness, acceptance and ultimately redemption through the poet's close relationship with Nature, her marriage, motherhood through adoption and poetry itself.

North Window is the second book of poems by Cambridge, MA poet Emily H. Axelrod. Her first book of poems, Passerby, was published by Antrim House Press in 2015. Ms. Axelrod writes about fleeting moments embedded in memory, about family life, the natural world, and life on a small island in Maine. Her poems are informed by her childhood in California, and by her strong visual orientation. Ms. Axelrod's work has been published in the Galway Review, the Muddy River Review, and she was Poet of the Month in the online Goodreads poetry contest, and a winner of the Cambridge Sidewalk Poetry Contest in 2019.

Shakira Croce's debut poetry book, Leave It Raw, is grounded in the elemental forces while observing the otherworldly possibilities of human creativity. The poems explore the nuances of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, the arts, and ambition, speaking to relationships' potential to hurt and heal. As one poem reads: "We weave the most incredible plait,/ and leave it raw,/ unsewn straw running across tile." Each story offers bits of experience that provide an intimate glimpse of the intricacies of life. Croce is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. A Georgia native, after studying writing at Sarah Lawrence College and completing a Master's at Pace University, she currently works as Assistant Director of Communications and Public Relations at New York's largest Medicaid Special Needs Health Plan, Amida Care. Croce's poetry translations have appeared in Babel magazine, and her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and journals, including the New Ohio Review, Pilgrimage Press, Permafrost Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Transactions, Ducts, pioneertown, and Shark Reef. She was a featured reader in the Boundless Tales Reading Series, and she was a finalist in the Linda Flowers Literary Award competition.

Juanita Kirton's poetry collection is compelling, delivering a story of opposing forces of love and betrayal. The poems are brave and courageous and are found in tight spaces of kitchens, a church and a child's heart. Kirton breaks the barriers of silence and holds her own, turning the silence of despair into the found voice of a female spiritual warrior. She uses language so close to the bone, you feel as if you are on a motorcycle with her in the poem titled, "Back Seat". This collection is magnificent, a must read.