Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

It Started with the Wild Horses is a book of poems about wildness and inspiration, love and memory, family and motherhood. This collection explores how our experiences and relationships become memory; how encountering the wilderness outside our doors shapes us; and how a sense of place tells us about who we are. Ingrid Keriotis's first collection of poetry is rich with the sense of being alive today in all its pain and joy. Readers travel from Greece to California, from the Sierra Nevada to the rivers of Washington, from adolescence to parenthood, from classroom to orchard, from grief to hope. Ultimately, through personal themes, we are taken into a world celebrating our common humanity.

"Water Shedding" is a chapbook of poems committed to a vision of marriage and family life that is real, sometimes even deeply lost and uncertain. The images do not avoid problems, do not create a façade in the way of our social media personas. Instead the poet journeys through the aging of her children, her marriage, and her sense of self with an awareness of missteps and a sense of joy for the small moments she can claim.

Slippery Surfaces by Donna Spruijt-Metz takes an unflinching journey into personal history, the lies and truths we tell each other and ourselves. The poems show us the illusiveness of memory, mix lyricism with humor to excavate secrets, and to examine love, death and divinity. What are the stories we tell ourselves to get through, and how do they change with time? How do we stand in the physical world as it crumbles around us? How does love build us and change us? These poems return again and again to our relationships with each other, with parents, children, loved ones, and with God.

Traversing the sparse and sometimes rugged territory from Stevensville, Montana to the Flathead Indian Reservation, Bitterroot poignantly witnesses the complex intersections of Native and non-Native culture in Montana. A testament to the spirit of the land and those shaped by it, this collection reveals the ways in which the West remains both fraught with tension and modeled by beauty. Narrated by a young teacher with unexpected ties to the children in her classroom, each poem unfolds another layer of mountain life- from hauling wood and making fire to navigating a blizzard and grieving the loss of a student. Page by page, life presses closely against that which is raw and wild, lending individual moments a sense of urgency: "What I remember/ from Ovando, though, is stars. Stars and ice/ and the shock of our short inward breath." Attentive to a long tradition of tough Montana poets, Jessica Jones pays homage to giants such as Richard Hugo and James Welch while befriending contemporary writers like Jennifer Finley Greene and Robert Lee. A runner-up with Open Country Press and honorable mention with Cutbank at University of Montana, Bitterroot is essential for any avid reader of Western literature.

"The Hidden Wilderness" is Linda Ann Suddarth's exploration of "other places" as she calls them. Listen to their litany: sacred space, behind a story, where happiness reigns, some wild space, forever, snowy places, enchanted spots. These are places of the imaginal, where reason and rationality struggle to enter." Dennis Patrick SlatteryThese poems are a collection of what is hidden in the natural world and also within. The relationship between nature and the inner self can be reciprocal, if one learns to listen. The poems also include the thorny yet beautiful relationship between humans. The natural world exudes healing, beauty, and honesty giving a place of rest. These poems were conceived in a sacred natural space in the Appalachian region of Virginia, near Charlottesville, where there is the familiar landscape of childhood, and ancient familial spirits of earthy hard-working ancestors. This region is full of enchantment of the old-fashioned variety which is also found in Ireland's sacred spaces, as is alluded to in the poem "Born to Earth: Newgrange." The woods, and tops of mountains, still speak in lovely ways. Much can be learned about how to be human when stepping into the invisible delineations of sacred space.

From the very first poem, where sprawling development drives deer out of their forest home onto into a suburban neighborhood, South Carolina poet, H. R. Spencer's work confronts, too, the human challenge to understand our place in the natural order. The Color After Green crosses unique human territories from the dangerous work of urchin divers in Maine to the manufacture of deadly chemicals that spill into our waters and remain poisonous a half century later. In another poem, the harvesting of horseshoe crabs, where products from their blood are used to create medications, becomes a fable, where the Grandest Horseshoe laments their collective endangerment with a Monarch butterfly and a Red Knot sandpiper. The effects of global warming show up in the title poem and in "Eco-Travel," a vivid description of a trip through the "rainless rain forests" of Costa Rica. Other poems deal simply with the speaker's observations of the world around him, whether kayaking and encountering small epiphanies, such as the water striders "dimpled symmetries" mirroring those of the paddle or the "throaty red luminescence" of the green anole "capturing sunlight" on a button bush. He watches the spider lily, their buds "swell, buckle open at their crown" and explode into a "leafless, botanical firework," or the rats in the corn crib with "wet bituminous eyes." The poet's background as a visual artist lends authenticity to a poem about the last reflections of John James Audubon on his life's work or later where he speaks through the voice of Georgia O'Keeffe describing the emotions behind her flower paintings. Toward the end the book becomes more a personal journey through the poet's own childhood, his rich engagement with the life in and on Virginia's historic James River, and the passing of the generations there. The final two poems are a terrifying description of surviving Hurricane Hugo in 1989 South Carolina and a meditation on the death of his teacher, James Dickey, that unites the spiritual kingdom of the poet with his deliverance back into "the kingdom of ferns, of mosses," with "emotions, pre-vertebrate," and "his motion now the motion of the earth." These poems reflect on the beauty and complexity of nature and Man's relationship to the natural world, but don't hesitate also talk explicitly about our troubled environment and how our foolish, sometimes selfish, attitudes can lead toward its destruction.

Tyler Truman Julian's debut collection of poetry, Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), takes you up and down Wyoming's highways and back and forth across a state obsessed with legacy and the reality that within its borders everyone dies younger. Across these linked poems, Julian introduces you to a story wrestling with questions of both past and present, a family trying to survive, and a speaker seeking to define what it means to be an individual in the least populated state in the rapidly changing American West.

Tracey Daley Brocker brings to her poems the ability to express human nature through the natural world with clarity and a touch of humor.

In this story told through poetry, a gang-rape throws a teenage girl into adulthood on a path of promiscuity and abusive relationships. Giorgio incorporates several poetic forms, including haiku, villanelle and prose poem, to capture the shadow of a difficult past coloring the present and dimming the possibilities for a positive future. When the woman finally finds the courage to say no to abuse and submission, she faces herself and discovers her own worth. She learns to put herself first, even if it means being alone.

The chapbook The Need for a Bridge consists of 20 poems inspired by driving over the Fore River bridge, getting stuck in traffic on the bridge, and researching the history of the many bridges that have covered the Fore River. Wilson explains, "I did not know, until I spent some time reading The Patriot Ledger on microfilm at the Thomas Crane Library in Quincy (Massachusetts) that people have been complaining about the bridge going up and impeding traffic since 1918! We all have our stories about our frustration with the old bridge, and this book has formalized some of mine. It has been a meaningful endeavor to research these poems, present them at readings, and meet those of you who also know the bridge and have been inconvenienced trying to cross it." Alice Kociemba, author of Bourne Bridge, writes "These poems, intricate portraits spanning time and distance, celebrate connections. Through the power of poetry, we come to care about the Fore River Bridge and its people and see how this bridge has the capacity to remember." George Kalogeris, author of Guide to Greece, describes the poems in Wilson's new collection as "quintessentially American in their concern for human connection and formal lyric expression." Her themes span the generations as well as the turbulent history of the region and the nation.

In Elegy & April, Curran submits to the wisdom of the seasonal round to mourn and celebrate ordinary experience. Inhaling grace and exhaling gratitude, these poems find their place in the present.

Novelist Jessica Barksdale's first poetry collection When We Almost Drowned contains award wining poems that grapple with issues of family and love, sisters and parents.