Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Set in the natural environment of the American West, the poems in Desert Meditations advocate immersing oneself in the natural world as a way to reconnect to that inner core which sustains everyone. Offering an alternative to the hectic pace of contemporary life, these short and accessible poems acknowledge the restorative effects of reconnecting with nature. They suggest that seeking stillness and solitude and cultivating an awareness of the complexity of the natural world are essential to living a complete and satisfying life.

The poems in this book have transitions in common - from death and dying, whether accidental or planned, to milestones such as a son leaving home etc. There's love palpably felt after death and beyond it, little epiphanies from near-disasters, the whole subject of death from many different angles - the news that breaks us, how our lives are enlarged by telling moments. The title poem "Irresistible" and "Tandem Hang-Gliding Incident" embody our human failings and the unnecessary accidental deaths we suffer as a result. But also, physically, death is inevitable and therefore irresistible - we can't resist it. It will happen sooner or later: our first breath inspires our last, so to speak, and our last - for those believing there's more beyond our bodies - inspires our first on a different plane. The awareness of limited time allows an appreciation for the preciousness of life in all its forms (animal journeys as well as human ones) while offering buoys of humour, irony and joy throughout these pages.

The title of Linda McClure Dunn's chapbook, "Shape and Shadow", uses those words more in their verb sense than as nouns, although the latter is detectable. It is a retrospective assessment of the ever-morphing web of heredity, culture, and individual experience shaping who we are at any given time in our lives. It explores influences from the distant past through childhood and into the latter stages of life, as well as the impact of change life inevitably brings. There is a haunting element in this type of looking back as relationships and events are revisited, sometimes in metaphor, and receive acceptance but not always without regret. The final poem reveals how this objective reconsideration grants the author fuller understanding of and a certain patience with the unfolding of life.

Nolde was raised in a small farming community in Sullivan County, New York, in the house built by her great grandparents on the land cleared by her great-great grandparents, immigrants from Ireland. She records in formal and free verse her deep connection to family tradition and to the history of the region and her concern for what has been lost through change. Her work explores how travel and the arts can unite us across the distance of time and place.

Disorientation brought about by new or frustrated love; impending death; or unfamiliar geography, both physical and psychological, engenders lyrical encounters with the self and others. Disorientation and the Weather is all about Relationship with a capital R. In the largest sense, these poems are conversations with the universe held by characters as disparate as an airplane passenger, a lover, a museum guard, a patient, a parent, a traveler, or even a dog. The weather infiltrates and colors their experience: rain on a humid summer night; the play of light and dark across snow in cold winter; a subtropical night on a beach. The poems would like to break your heart by juxtaposing what we know with what we don't know. And we survive, though not unscarred, with sangfroid and wit and the consolation of getting the words right. In what could perhaps be described as a search for the sacred in the secular, the poems ultimately come down on the side of love: how hard it is, how worth it.

Helen Marie Casey's "Zero Degrees" is a brave endeavor to remember victims of hatred, mayhem, and violence. The writer of this series embeds poems of remarkable strength and beauty in our consciousness. She makes international turmoil real and vivid to us, not as a journalist, but as a poet of intensity and empathy. This work is highly recommended not only to literature lovers but also to politicians, ethicists, historians, and students of international relations. It is protest poetry at its best because it never loses sight of its first priority: To imbue the lines of every one of these poems with the images, rhythms, patterns, and shape that make them art of the highest order. As witness to contemporary horrors, this series of poems is unflinching: By any measure, a remarkable achievement.Ms. Casey has previously created poetry chapbooks that centered on heroic women who gave their life for their beliefs, fifteenth-century Joan of Arc (Fragrance Upon His Lips, Finishing Line Press), and seventeenth-century Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer (Inconsiderate Madness, Black Lawrence Press, a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Prize of the Boston Authors Club). She has also written a monograph, Portland's Compromise: The Colored School 1867-1872, and a biography, My Dear Girl: The Art of Florence Hosmer. She is at work on a sequel to this, The Florence Hosmer Story. She has won the 14th National Poet Hunt of The MacGuffin, judged by Thomas Lynch, and the Frank O'Hara Prize from The Worcester Review. Some of her Dyer poems have been converted into a song cycle performed twice in Montana.A former corporate communications specialist, Helen has taught literature and writing courses and has been active in civic affairs in New England with a focus on voters' services efforts and on historical preservation projects. She was the first president of the Metrowest Leadership Academy Alumni Association, served on her town's Finance Committee, and is active in the Boston Authors Club and the New England Poetry Club.

Amid the everyday dramas of a walk to the bus stop, a drive to the grocery store, a trip to the zoo, how do we slow down and pay attention to the small miracles around us? We think of mindfulness as something we get to do when we escape from our kids-sitting alone in an immaculate yoga studio or on a quiet retreat in some pristine location. But children don't have to be a barrier to contemplation. They can inspire a special kind of awe in the natural world and in the mundane details of life-but only if we stop and notice. Yes, during bath time, and while we weed the garden, our kids-especially, sometimes, our most challenging kids-can show us deep truths. And when the larger world seems to be falling apart, we must realize that our daily struggles aren't separate from those events. How are we connected-to the world, to each other, and to those parts of ourselves that we've put on hold or hidden away? How can we walk alongside our children, at their pace, and let them teach us to see the world in new ways? "I wrote these poems during the year of my son's autism diagnosis. I found that I was more able to cope with each impossible day if I could find a few beautiful moments to focus on. I would take photos, while out with my children, and then after they were finally in bed I'd go back and look through those photos and write-digging in to the meaning of those brief blessings. Even though I was exhausted and overwhelmed, I'd spend some time dwelling in that place of beauty and abundance that they'd shown me. Over time, I realized I was training myself to notice those moments. My hope is that by reading these poems, readers will be encouraged to do the same."

It just so happens... Poems to Read Aloud is the debut collection from Greer Gurland. She is a student of Seamus Heaney and it shows. These accessible, insightful poems with a nuanced depth resonate. Ms Gurland is an Academy of American Poets prize winner for Harvard College and holds The Baumeister Scholarship in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson where she is earning her MFA in Poetry.

Mary Anna Dunn faces her family history as she weaves her ancestors' letters into spirituals and poetry to imagine the lives of the people they enslaved.Dunn's brilliant sense for sound and rhythm will take you, on every line, through every word, into thought and reflection. John Most...a local habitation in cadences that recreate its people, its customs, and its enduring legacy of grief. Michael Waters…bracing, rewarding, and strangely beautiful. Douglas Nordfors

This chapbook traces one woman's journey to and through new motherhood, from when she first discovers she is pregnant ("Houseguest") to when she struggles to keep an energetic toddler away from the dog's water bowl ("Sixteen Months"). With poignancy and precision, Alles captures the emotions that accompany bringing new life into the world, from the terrifying fear of losing that baby ("Early Spring") to the joyful disruptions infants cause ("Induction"), and all the emotions in between. Alles, an award-winning author, shares her hard-to-put-into words experiences as a new mom in this thoughtful assemblage of poems. Composed in a sleepless, dreamy haze, these lines are the heart of what it means to enter the world of parenthood. "Lullaby," included in the chapbook, was selected as the Poetry Society of Michigan's 3rd place finisher in the society's annual poetry contest (category: anaphoric poems) in August of 2016. It also appears in the Fall 2016 issue of Peninsula Poets: Contest Edition (73-2). A former teacher, Alles currently works at a public library in West Michigan to best share her love of all things books. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Red Cedar Review, Peninsula Poets, Cardinal Sins, Write Michigan 2016 Anthology, and others. In 2016, her short story "Fifth Circle" won the Readers' Choice award in the Kent District Library's annual Write Michigan short story contest. She is a graduate of Michigan State University and Wayne State University. She writes when she has time (and when no one else is home).

"Place" is loosely interpreted in Marianne Gambaro's chapbook, Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers, published by Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky. The 23 poems transport the reader beyond Gambaro's home in idyllic Western Massachusetts on journeys which include the emigration of a 14-year-old girl from Italy to be the replacement wife in America for her sister who died in childbirth. Gambaro again captures the immigrant experience vividly in "Euro Mutts," describing the struggle and sacrifices of these newly-arrived Americans. She ventures inside the mind of a woman with dementia and a man who brings his dog with him to witness his suicide. Her poems are inspired by people and places-a boy negotiating with a neighbor to buy tulips for his mother for Mother's Day, an astronaut playing her flute while she floats in the international space station, and a little girl gaily celebrating her birthday on the observation deck of the Twin Towers, a scene poignant in retrospect. The majesty and lore of the American West are portrayed in such poems and "Bandelier" and "Meteor Crater, Arizona." And the award-winning "Yellowstone in Winter" gives us a glimpse of the stark beauty and survival skills of wildlife in this very special place. The title poem, Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers, is a road poem in which the narrator is driving (fleeing?) back to New England after attending a funeral in New Jersey and recalls a story about an Italian immigrant executed in Sing Sing Prison. A former journalist, Gambaro's style is narrative and straightforward, making this book accessible to poetry lovers and non-devotees alike. As the poet Kevin Pilkington has written about Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers: "Go on this journey with Gambaro and you will discover through her eyes what everyone else overlooks. So read her poems, take this journey with her and enrich your life."

In Conversations with Trees, the poet weaves in and out of , memory, family and nature with vivid images that illuminate and transform day to day moments into universal matters of the heart.

This collection could be called The Lives of Girls and Women if Alice Munro hadn't already taken the title. In funny, lyrical, poignant poems and prose poems, Herman conjures everyone from lonely teenage girls listening to records in their bedrooms to her own Depression-era seamstress mother to Betty Boop to the oldest daughter of the old woman who lives in a shoe.

In this mesmerizing work of lyrical prose, Casey Clabough ingeniously brings to life the consciousness of one of fiction's most fascinating characters: the whale of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Alternately loved, hunted, and made privy to the strange secrets of existence, the endangered creature struggles to know its place in the universe even as it fights for its life.

A collection of simple poems on the aging and passing away of a parent. Heart-felt and poignant expressions of caring for a loved one in a critical life passage, and the feelings and experiences that come after death.The title poem "To My Mother: Winter Circus" won top honors in the Glen Swarthout Contest judged by Jack Driscoll.

In "I'll Build Us a Home," Emily Paige Wilson uses magic and spells to chronicle a young couple in the year after they move in together as they experience domestic, financial, and political uncertainty.

Kentucky Lullaby is Matthew Vetter's first chapbook, a collection of 25 lyric poems examining the complexities of fatherhood and the Appalachian experience. For two of these poems, "The Shapes of Leaves" and "Poem at Sulphur Hollow," Vetter received the Danny Miller Memorial Prize in Poetry. "Wild Flowers," additionally, was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser to appear in the nationally syndicated column American Life in Poetry.