Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

In Downtown, southern-born poet Nicole Callihan confronts life in downtown Brooklyn. A meditation on class and race, marriage and children, Callihan's fractured narrative tries to make sense of what it means to be alive and to, ultimately, find redemption in the day-to-day.

In these vulnerable and wise poems Rebecca Jamieson probes the complexities of family, growing up, and the sheer mystery of being an embodied consciousness in a world that is at once beautiful and painful. The poems in The Body of All Things are curative and astringent in their intimacy and hard-won insights.

As We Forgive Those stumbles over a young mother's grief, a grief that comes in many forms as a girl and during the early years of motherhood. As old beliefs die, acceptance, clarification of purpose, and perspective fill the spaces that were once left empty.

We and She, You and Then, You Again traverses the Texas landscape through shifting points of view and shifting points of desire. This collection traces the inextricable links between self and place.

Parents die, and their children inherit the loose ends left behind. Our parents left behind a large suburban house bursting with dusty inexplicables - a live hand grenade, a four-fingered glove, check stubs from the 50's, year upon year of Road & Track, a locked strongbox with nothing inside. They had neglected doing uncomfortable things, like settling on one of us as executor, disposing of our youngest brother's ashes, and setting up a financial safety net for the one of us who needed but wouldn't ask for help, who, at nearly 60, still lived in the basement of their house. We sorted through, donated and tossed objects we had previously coveted into the 20 yard dumpster hulking outside. We too postponed hard choices, stacking boxes of indecision in a dark room at Public Storage. As we emptied, then sold the house we had lived in for most of our childhoods, Never Enough emerged poem by often difficult poem.

In this wry, poignant collection of poems, Chilcote writes about the homes we're shaped by as well as the homes we shape as adults. His poems are about finding your voice in the midst of struggle, taking the experiences of growing up in a place and creating something new out of the old, and nurturing a family, a marriage and a creative life in the aftermath of the recession.

"A Pound of Dirt" examines the burdens passed from mothers to daughters, and the histories we write for ourselves that help us survive but come with the price of unfinished work and relationships.

Exhalation Halves Lambda is a collection of love affairs between water and a bathtub, poetry and biology, person and place. The poems vary in form and content from sevenlings to sonnets to prose.

Inspired by fado, Marina Carreira's debut chapbook, I Sing to That Bird Knowing He Won't Sing Back, conjures up and tangles with the mighty Fate as muse. From ruminations on such historical characters as Lizzie Borden, Sylvia Plath, and Inês de Castro, to its odes to mothers and sardines, rustic villages and gritty cities, I Sing to That Bird… is a poetry collection that blends myth with memory, highlighting and exploring geographical and spiritual space, sexuality and love in its inception stages, the bittersweet ties to immigrant family, culture and history and their relationship to the heart. Written both to the beat and viewpoint of this traditional Portuguese soul-folk music, I Sing to That Bird Knowing He Won't Sing Back which is as nihilistic as it is hopeful in its adoration and disturbance of life's abstractions.

Air-Breathing Life is a not only a field guide to the house sparrow, blue morpho butterfly, and salmon, but also to grief, Catholicism, redemption, and a search for meaning. As Ellen Bass says, the poems are "rich with the natural world-salmon, locusts, summer corn, periwinkles-and humans with their suffering and their absurdity, like the mother who, as she's dying, sends the daughter to the store for 50 cents off the tissue paper. Often Warren's poems reveal the ways in which all beings are surprisingly alike, as in the wonderful title poem, "Air-breathing Life"-a description of sleeping with a new lover who twists, flaps and slaps his tail like a hooked fish while the poet slides an arm in his fin and waits while you adjust/to this air, this life/of yours with me. These are insightful, well-made poems that show us truths about ourselves and the multitude of life around us."

In this collection of poems, Holly Norton navigates the terrain of grief and excavates the treasures that may be found there, exploring memories of loss in childhood, womanhood, and middle age to arrive at the destination of acceptance and culminate in a life fully lived. Norton describes experiences that defined her relationships with those most influential in her life, parents, a sibling, lovers, and the profound self-discovery that resulted. In lyrical lines Norton sings songs that carry the reader through image after image of loss and recovery.

Sarah Bokich's collection Rocking Chair at the End of the World invites the reader to share an imperative and deeply human journey to the nebulous intersection of bereavement and renewal. In poems such as "The Visitors" and "Trading the Animals," Bokich adopts the personas of a lover, a zookeeper, an infant, and a young mother to study the different ways we find ourselves suspended-between successive phases of life, between dreams and reality, and between the natural and developed worlds. Tender, fierce, and irreverent in turn, Bokich explores our human appetites and frailties in a debut collection that former Oregon Poet Laureate Peter Sears describes as "devastating" and writer and critic David Biespiel praises as exhibiting "a virtuosity of solemn joy." With a unique blend of lyricism and violence that echoes the work of Sylvia Plath, Bokich struggles to ascertain her roles as a woman and mother, while pursuing a central question: how best to love each other in this world and the next.

Rich in natural, mythical, medical, and pop-cultural imagery, Alison Moncrieff's first chapbook Cherrystem leaves a mark as it reveal the mystical terrain of an ordinary life. Moncrieff's poetry bring us to an emotional place in quick moments evoking dreams, pleasures, griefs, fears, and traumas. We will return to this book repeatedly as we would a sensory, coded prayer for our possible selves and forms, for healing, or for regeneration. In Cherrystem, Moncrieff attends to assumptions and contradictions inside housewifery, motherloss, childhood isolation, time, and motherhood, among other things. The chapbook is a map of places where interior truths bump up against cultural dead ends and bust through those fences between the last two houses into the wilderness beyond. With attention on memory and how mourned people and times don't ever really leave us, Moncrieff manages losses with DIY motherdolls, superhero capes, and dream escapes. Pop culture figures - Slugterra, My Little Pony, David Bowie - figure as friends, confidants, and seers. And, along the way, we embody Egyptian goddesses and Greek fates. Healing happens in hospital beds in front of cartoons, in the deserts of Egypt, or through the TV language of some powerful kids trained to fight with slugs. Cherrystem is an apothecary for quotidian moments of being human. Cherrystem is a sequence of quick, healing breaths to invigorate a numb moment. It is a reminder that reason doesn't always visit us in reasonable ways. Sometimes we speak in voices we don't recognize, and things come down the pike we don't expect, as we undertake unquestioning the activities of animal survival. Cherrystem ask us to greet what comes.

Deborah Kahan Kolb was born and raised in an insular Hasidic community in Brooklyn, NY, and many of the poems featured in her debut chapbook Windows and a Looking Glass are reflective of her strict religious upbringing. Ultimately, she left the constraints of the community and has written poetry informed not only by her uniquely challenging past, but also by family and community, marriage and children, and shared histories and experiences. Windows and a Looking Glass is the poet's first offering - a gathering of anecdotes, snippets, and glimpses of characters and stories that populate the childhood and adulthood of this first-time author. The poems take the reader on a modern and edgy, autobiographical and biographical, observant and experiential excursion through childhood and community, relationships and marriage, and back to childhood and parenting on the other end.Poems included in this collection are winners of the Queens College James E. Tobin Poetry Award, "Zhou Ling," a finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, and "Eldest Daughter," a piece that highlights the oppression of women in Hasidic communities (in Veils, Halos & Shackles).