Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Her Landscape, Poems Based on the Life of Mileva Mari¿ Einstein is what Albert's first wife has to say. Read it to discover Mileva's beauty, passion, and resilience in a marriage and a world that failed her.

Set along lonely highways, the voices within When the Body is a Guardrail are restless and searching-these poems are seeking new ways of seeing, of being, of interpreting what it means to be human. Too often we treat life like a highway, like an 80s rock ballad, as both distance and a bridge, speeding towards some vast unknown, donning knee and shoulder pads, shin-guards and helmets, learning "to pull on flak jackets" and "to tread with stealth" that jewelry "jangles like an aftermath of traps." We want to be close, create intimacy without risk, but fail. And when we fail, we cannot forgive each other, or ourselves. The truth is, we drive into the morning light forgetting that experience will change us by the time we drive home through the evening sun. Each time we change, we become a new person, versions of ourselves that are never fully erased. When the Body is a Guardrail doesn't hide from disappointment or failure, that "soft-wet empty snow already understands." This collection begs us to pay attention: to the isolation of routine and small towns; to our allegiance to beginnings and endings but not to the journey itself; to the addict inside all of us. With eyes on the horizon, we are always looking for that bliss, that Eden, that perfection, and we are always failing. However, these poems are testaments to our resiliency, because despite all our flaws, we keep trying, we keep trucking along with windows rolled down and radios blaring.

This book is a kaleidoscope and travelogue of my life on the stony road towards art (lower case "a", always, for me, in the word art) - art as a form of learning and survival. One poem in this book, a poem about the part of my life I spent in Newport, Rhode Island, called To be somewhere, to say things about that place, expresses the sense of suspension between two worlds that I was trying to capture in the book's title (which is a line from another poem in the book, a poem about a dream I had about forgiveness). To be somewhere is just the highest swing of a pendulum, and to able to say anything about that place, about being there at that moment, comes in when the movement of the pendulum is suspended in air, right before it tries to swing back down and through equilibrium. The poems in this book have that sort of kinetic energy in them in different ways. Other parts of the traveling ideas in this work, metaphorical or literal, also come from my having grown up in a military family, the child of parents (including a father who served in combat in Vietnam) who each had a Dad in WWII-that family history infuses some of the work in this book, if not always directly via the subject matter. The cover of the book is a photograph I took of a doorway at the Georg Trakl House in Salzburg, Austria, in 2018. He was a lyric poet who died after being wounded in spirit by his experience in WWI, and when I saw the open doorway, it felt like an invitation. I snapped the picture, and forgot about it for a while, and then found it again at the right time.

Persistence of Perception is a strange, powerful poetry collection with the heart and soul of a live spoken word album, where the records skips the record skips through underground mansions and scat-man phrases, where faerie tales curl like kittens on windowsills and drifters mend their blues. Reid's poems are memory meals for the happy and heartbroken alike. He knits tight storytelling and sticky truths with threads of magic realism, hints of Eastern philosophy. Nathan J. Reid finds a way to catch us all between the canvas and the paint with poems about dying loves, traveling character actors, Batman underwear, and film reels joined start to finish. You enter into bizarrely beautiful planes of reality by reading this book, by swallowing its thoughts and reciting the sounds. Reid brings you from adult to embryo to child to adult again, offering a hand when needed, and always moving with a sweet and forward light.

Things feel on the verge of coming undone in many of the poems of Starting Again. The poems express an impulse to move beyond that, to start again or to want to stitch together rifts in ordinary moments like the aftermath of a hospital stay, getting stuck on a sandy road in a desert, childlessness, loss of political conviction, depression, and other everyday threats to a sense of hope. The poems ask whether we know what we have and if we can see experience as whole when we feel small disconnects-tugs "at a loose thread."

Robert Dreesen's debut chapbook titled 20th Century Tool Shed constructs a narrative that simmers as he chisels a penetrating commentary on the modern world. With dexterity, Dreesen creates precise poems that matter to us, where "The Shovel is willful, / God of the Old Testament / before he 'got religion.' " These poems are full and contain sharp insights into ourselves and our histories.-Michael Catherwood, author of Projector

Intelligence and musicality entwine in 34 short poems that leave the reader "braced with stunned relief" -- a grand round trip through history, music and art which brings us back each time to more of what we didn't know we needed, until we find it here.

Janus, the debut poetry collection from emerging Bay Area writer Esther Lim Palmer, is an evocative exploration into the ever-evolving, and often incongruous, realms of daughterhood, marriage, and motherhood.

Crow Mind is a wide-ranging poetic meditation on the delights and curiosities of relations between our kind and corvids-two smart but very different creatures eyeing each other. It's a backyard conversation, a research project, a warning, a choral offering, a lovesong to the wild world we find right up against our doorsteps.

In Open The Fist, the poet navigates the primal impulses of sexuality, violation and reclamation. She shines a light into the dark corners of her family dynamics, grappling with what it means to be born a girl, to survive into womanhood and to look back. These poems bear witness to the healing power of truth-telling. Childhood trauma may cast its long shadow, but through the alchemy of poetry, Braden transforms her past into a path to forgiveness. In the end, the reader celebrates with the poet as she exclaims: "Risk the ricochet of fate/taunt the gods/with your raucous joy!"

The fact that the title of this book is taken from the great jazz piece written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out might suggest something about the structure. Gathered from a couple of years work, we would agree on a rubric-place, travel, philosophical ideas that we would respond to from our own experiences but also keeping in mind the others to create a kind of loose dialogue. "Jazz is about freedom within discipline," Dave Brubeck once said. The book is organized to keep in mind the eclectic mix of rhythms and musical themes in Brubeck's Time Out and to echo the three part jazz concerto, So, the first section contains poems that tend to address who we are, the kinds of things we tend to notice (as for example, Laura Baird's "Surface of Things." Some of these poems are political as in Barbara Carlson's "After Threats of Nuclear War," while some others deal with social or ethical issues. The book has an improv feeling, like the exchanges between Milosz and Merton, Stafford and Bell, in a tradition that harks back to Dante and Cavalcanti.Collectively, the five poets have published about 35 books (winners of James Agee, Ashland, Concho Rio, Cleveland State, and Juniper Prize and Maxine Kumin Awards) and have won numerous awards including Guggenheim, Fulbright, Witter-Bynner, NEA, NEH Fellowships, to several Pushcart awards to awards from being Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and Translation Workshop Awards from Slovenia. The authors also range from New England to Tennessee to Alabama, and teach at universities such as the University of New Hampshire and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, are editors of a couple of journals (Solstice and Poetry Miscellany), and include a tutor and counselor. They have traveled around the world, writing these exchanges as dispatches from Europe and various places in the United States.Laura (Behr) Baird's poems appear in numerous magazines and in Paddleshots: Selected and Bottled by River Pretty, and The Heart's Many Doors. • Deborah Brown is the author of 2 poetry books, co-edited a book on poetics, and co-translated Last Voyage with Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas. • Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of 2 poetry collections, co-translator of 2 books of poems by Sre¿ko Kosovel and co-editor of A Bridge of Voices. • Richard Jackson is the author of 15 books of poems, 10 of criticism, and winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA , and Slovene Order of Freedom. • Susan Thomas has published 3 poetry collections, and a collection of short stories.