Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Home is a relative term, especially if you have grown up overseas. In HOMESCAPES, Lee Woodman takes us from an Indian village to the edge of Tibet to a small town in New Hampshire. An audience with the Dalai Lama touches her spirit; questions from an American high school homeroom teacher challenge her wit. Lee never stops searching for what it means to be American, digs deep to understand her New England roots, and ponders intimate relationships, persistently asking, "Where-and what-is home?"

This flash fiction novella, The Grief Manuscript, illustrates the dream-like, annihilating, and repetitive gestures of a dying marriage. The story recasts the emotional range of grief using metaphorical images and remarkable characters in brief, poetic scenes. The recently separated narrator inhabits a series of temporary houses as she faces the devastating and radical identity changes that come with divorce. Grief activates the narrator's demon, who appears in the form of a small monster, the Burden Animal, who torments her with her previous humiliations and belief that she is a burden to those who love her. Magical realism offers images of personal torment, where the narrator's head falls off, spiders crawl up her throat, her tongue escapes, and the fields of her psyche burn. It isn't until the narrator accepts the full expanse of her grief that she can see a way to move forward to what is "next."

A Series of Moments is a meditation on places in the world and on our place in the world. Taken together, these poems reveal the deep connections we have to the places where we are and have been. As the opening poem suggests, though, the work is "a series of moments" that ring their own notes without the imposition of a larger narrative framework.

With layered attention to sound, image, rhythm, metaphor, Where Space Bends' carefully hewn poems bring alive the story of a woman who lives by herself in an enchanting, rural mountain hamlet. Bookended and woven throughout is the shadow of Lyme Disease. The book invites us into her inner reflections, how she uncovers wonder in daily rituals. She yanks out creeper vines, overwinters roots in the basement just before the equinox, crisps sunflower seeds and shovels new snow, hoisting mounds onto frozen banks higher than her shoulders. She considers the patience of the hundred-year-old Victorian, and asks whether those that had owned it had loved it enough. Alone by choice through an uncharacteristically cold winter, she sees she is aging in the feathering whiteness of her hair. The book unfolds into discoveries of how Lyme Disease may have developed into something so virulent and what could be resulting ramifications. Realizations about other worlds that exist within us lead the reader into the excited joy of the Lyme Disease spirochetes, into their ecstasy, how they revel in our tissues. This happens as the woman explores natural forms of healing in her conversations with the daunting heat of the sauna, her prayers to the poison of wormwood. Interspersed with existential depression, a desire for escape from paralyzing snows, temperatures hovering near zero for weeks, she questions the complicated surfaces of difficult emotions as if they were an alternate kind of being. In her yearning to woo the universe, she searches for transformation in the smallest things. In the bagfuls of grimy pennies a roommate has left, in the pale masks of new born raccoons, in the razor spikes and velvet pockets of chestnut hulls. She marvels at mayflies who live for just one day, their mouths with no moving parts, their only reason for existence to reproduce. She bravely crosses out the legal birth name and pencils her beloved friend's vital name into the soft wood, as the conveyer belt rolls the coffin into the crematory furnace. There is even mindfulness, devotion to detail and poetic justice within her loss.With an overriding sensitivity, she understands her strange reality is based on a compendium of possibilities of thought, minute bodily sensations and swirling energies that take place for her simultaneously. Even in simple times.This is a book about a searcher, even in the face of changing illnesses, a believer in the gift of meaning, who is always hopeful for a way through. Vibrant in the mist and wind of mountain seasons, she is always aware that she is at a crossroads.

My Pet Sounds Off "translates" 35 popular Beach Boys songs from English to English, updating, editorializing, and fooling around with the poppy lyrics of the world's favorite surf band. Put on your sunscreen. Pull out the deck chair. Prepare to revisit - with 21st century eyes and ears - the soundtrack to your adolescent romantic fantasies, crushing break-ups, and endless summers spent at the beach awash in ocean waves, pheromones, and tight harmonies.

The poem, Welsh Mare Corralled, was named a finalist for the Orlando Poetry Prize.

Part poetry, part lyric essay, Sundial is about friendship turning into infatuation, and the desperation that accompanies unrequited love. Written with lush language and playful breaks of the fourth wall, the collection meditates on time, youth, and art's role in shaping reality.

Dorie LaRue's title alludes to a line from Othello: "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains." In this searingly honest collection, the enemy is drugs, and the brains being stolen are those of our children. Much has been written about the drug epidemic, but only LaRue understands the all-consuming hunger that drives it: "the idea that being drugged/is better than being alive." The ghost of Anne Sexton, who was also driven by such hungers, presides over these poems, as rich with imagery as hers.-Julie Kane, Professor Emeritus, Northwestern State University, and Poet Laureate 2011-2013

This stunning collection of lyric poems celebrates the fierce beauty of what it means to be fully alive in these challenging times and the unique role that art and art-making play in that. How and why do we make art? How does it make us?Swimming through both grief and praise, these finely-honed poems navigate a journey of creation and self-creation, seeking acceptance and wholeness in the midst of life's trials.Crafted in the form of a three-part aria, the poems explore and interrogate the extraordinary aspects of language, art and music and their reflections in the natural world and in our lived experiences. Juxtaposing wonder and horror, mystery and rapture, the poems pay homage equally to the physical world and the realms of the imagination and the spirit.With probing keenness, the poet asks questions that are left ringing in the reader, calling us to greater aliveness and participation. Maxima Kahn gives voice to the unsayable and vision to the invisible, bringing a vivid intensity to the page and casting a spell with words that lingers.

In his debut collection Lookaftering, Ray Holmes writes about the many relationships we form as young people that shape us into the adults we eventually become. His poems take readers through landscapes both familiar and metaphorical in order to revisit those family dynamics, friendships, and loves that have such strong bearing on the way a person sees their world.

This is a story told with poems about sons and fathers, how the one gradually becomes the other, starting with a dream, growing up and growing old together. It's a journey that's as long as a memory, and a cycle that never ends.

In 2018, Cooper Young received the Alex Adam Award at Princeton University to travel through Japan and write poetry. He traced the path of Matsuo Bash¿, the famous Japanese poet, who was renowned for his haiku and travel sketches. Following the tradition of the wandering poet, Cooper wrote about the people and places he encountered as he stopped at shrines, temples, rivers, and onsens, many of which were described in Bash¿'s famous book of haiku and prose (haibun), The Narrow Road to the Deep North.Sacred Grounds is a sketch of modern Japan: the people, culture, religion, and history. It explores the many ways the journey has changed since Bash¿'s time, and the ways in which it has stayed the same. The reader is invited to participate in the natural beauty of the landscapes and the moments of enlightenment available in everyday life.

The poems in Choosing a Stone, Richard Hedderman's first full-length poetry collection, masterfully explore the intersection of physical landscape and human consciousness. In sharply imagistic and muscular language, these visceral poems revel in the sensory delights that reinforce our shared humanity: praising hot black coffee, savoring a rustic Basque dinner, lazing in a hammock, or watching "the sky-map of cloud drift over the trees." He is archeologist and alchemist, quarrying an historical mythos to shape his powerful, deeply-realized vision. Hedderman's work intrepidly-and wryly-excavates and shapes an authentic understanding of our place in this world, and the one we've come from.

Rare Earth is a chapbook of poems that explore ideas of time, property, and boundary through an investigation of the poet's family's immigrant ranching history in South Dakota.

Francine E. Walls journeyed into the remote deserts of Death Valley, Anza-Borrego and Mojave, as well as the Kalahari in Botswana. Her poems mirror the beauty and danger of these wild places.

How the Dog Helps, written by Revey Hertzler, is a collection of poems which details an uncommon bond formed between the narrator and their dog as they both go through life with anxiety. The poems are told in a gender neutral voice in order to highlight the raw characteristics of an anxiety disorder, and to force that disorder to contend with itself in each interaction with an overly anxious pet.