Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

In her debut poetry collection, The Heart Room, poet and nurse Libby Kurz explores the literal heart as a metaphor for the complex realities of love and relationships. Like a body exposed on a surgery table, Kurz dissects the dueling forces of life and death, beauty and suffering, which are simultaneously flowing through the vessels of our own human experience. How do we handle an existence full of so much uncertainty? "Like cupping a bird in your hands," each poem is an invitation to delicately hold the mysteries and paradoxes of our own humanity. The poems "How to Handle a Heart" and "Transplant" winners in the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Prize.

owlmouth is a collection of poems about transformation. Michele Marie Desmarais (Métis, Dakota, European) offers perspectives on the environment, being-in-relationship, the need for change and the process of healing. These poems are an expression of an Indigenous worldview replete with relationships between human and other-than-human persons. owlmouth is about the possibilities of transformation within a life-in the face of colonialism and the sometime liminal identities on the urban rez. Reflecting on experiences of historical trauma due to the Indian Residential/Boarding Schools, as well as climate change and the responsibilities we have for our relatives who include both human and other-than-human persons, owlmouth is also about intergenerational resiliency, healing and the necessities of transforming the dominant culture. Depending on the Nation or culture, an owl may bring medicine, wisdom, or death. These poems explore all three within the overall theme of transformation, and, in doing so, reflect upon belonging, home, Indigenous/Native American perspectives, and the intersection of multiple moments, beings and cultures.

In this collection, Mary Christine Kane honors the complicated experience of childhood with a range of voices including a motherless child, a girl who collects toy rings and the adult looking back in longing. The poems remind us what comfort and longing feel like by opening the interior life of children-both moments like rolling down a grassy hill but also those of trying to reconcile life's hardest topics.

Inspired by Psyche and Eros, The Psyche Trials envisions a feminist resolution for Psyche along a sensual path from infatuation and loss to self-love and discovery. The poem "Cherimoya Heart" was among L'Éphémère Review's Best of 2018.

The story of one family and of the country: the lives and deaths of the parents of a Jewish, second- and third-generation immigrant family beginning in Coney Island.

In Two Tongues, Lana Issam Ghannam writes about her experiences growing up as a first-generation Palestinian-American in post-9/11 America. She creates small scenes from big perspectives in each poem as she navigates her two cultures from adolescence to adulthood. She moves in and out of family duty, religion, culture, gender expectations, patriotism, and competing languages in the search for her truest identity. These poems represent her growth, stand for her pride, and strive for the absolute strength known by so many immigrated families-"I grow beneath the ground / in this America of coloring seas. / …I am of this earth, this flame / …I own the roots of this land."

Exploring themes such as secrets, illness, and obsession, the poems in Kristin Brace's Each Darkness Inside lead the reader on an intimate journey through the overlooked and the unspoken. Desire, restlessness, and regret play out against backdrops of art, memory, geography, and nature, rendering the interior landscape as rich and varied as the visible world.

The poems in Frost Flowers by Winifred Hughes plunge, open-eyed and open-hearted, into the natural world-its seasonal rhythms and impenetrable mysteries, its vanishings, its incorrigible quality of being alive. They seek to chronicle the encounter between the non-human and the all-too-human, the passion and longing of our species as we relate to our natural environment, both apart from it and a part of it. Like the swallows and tanagers and foxes, like the box elder and frostweed, we are transitory creatures living in vivid moments. These poems are propelled by curiosity, precise observation, and a sense of wonder; they are a searching, a probing into the secrets at the heart of natural processes, which are the fundamental processes of life and death. The natural world appears under all its contradictory aspects-sharp stones in a streambed, hatchlings clinging to their precarious nest, wildflowers that are both beautiful and poisonous, the exuberance and overflowing life of a flock of blackbirds. In the midst of such fullness and blossoming, there is always the possibility of frost, whether nipping early buds or being transformed into late-blooming flowers made of ice. Like our fellow species, from hardwood trees growing slowly over centuries to small passerines with speeded-up metabolisms, we are subject to the passage of time; before we can quite grasp it, our moment is gone. Throughout, we are inextricably bound up in our natural context, in the wild places and wildlife that are increasingly threatened by human activity.

The title poem, "Common Violence," introduces the themes, images and sections of the book: war, terrorism, environmental desecration, domestic abuse, and physical disease. Not only do these facets of our lives have "violence in common," but the presence and news of violence around us is all too common, becoming the norm. The poem's call for grace, however, along with several poems embodying perceptions of beauty, love, and courage, create restorative counterpoints and promises of renewal.