Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

What started as a published author's online journal has taken on a life of its own. Anansi and Friends is a small book by a small woman about a big experience. From chemo haikus to real-time reflections, Sally Huggins Toner takes her readers on a sometimes humorous, often poignant, but always honest trip through breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and beyond.

Engaging and sharply observed, these poems plumb the depths of our collective unconscious by examining both our natural world and our history. By creating palpable experiences of private and public grief, the imagery and tone haunt and delight, teasing the reader to fully realize, by turns, the aching beauty and abject terror of our world.

Sequel continues the sequence begun in Hawken's full collection White Bird (FutureCycle Press, 2017) in which the predictable seasons of country life serve as foil to the unpredictable course of a beloved's struggle with cancer. Elegiac in tone, resilient in context, T.S. Eliot's objective correlative is alive and well in this rich yet accessible work. The speaker here looks with a "fierce unflinching eye" at a changed-by-illness world in which a menagerie of animals, wild and domestic, and birds reflect and enrich a human understanding.Language here is melodic and precise, the work of a keen ear and a poet well in command of her craft. Hawken often employs an end-line/first word rhyme scheme that wraps the work in language and tumbles the poems down the page.If you are a caregiver, or know one, if you are dealing with cancer or know someone who is, Sequel will bring comfort and the recognition of shared experience.

Blue Ghosts contains poems about what haunts us, what fascinates us, what we cannot leave behind because of what we carry within: experiences, memories, emotions, and desires. The collection catalogs defining moments, those that shift everything that comes after, and the feelings accompanying them: fear, grief, envy, resentment, hope, and intense love. The poems explore how we find and make meaning out of loss, how we transform ourselves and our lives. They seek understanding and comfort-sometimes found, sometimes not-in the natural world. Through them we traverse many landscapes, both literal and metaphorical, including a small rural town, the Catskill Mountains, the desert, the hospital, the monastery, and the garden; we engage with all manner of wild life, such as crows and foxes, dandelions and phlox, bottle flies and blue ghost fireflies. The poetry resonates with an appreciation of the difficulties and the miracles of the everyday, of the ordinary, and reminds us of how we fit, how we belong, even when it feels that we do not. Each poem becomes a dewdrop containing "clouds / in reflected heavens" that medieval legend tells us ravens consumed upon being born, "drop / by / drop."

Written in a wry and knowing voice, Jessica McEntee's debut chapbook Jackie O. Suffers Two Husbands looks at topics ranging from the bittersweet realities of motherhood to the mad headiness of desire. "Interspecies Communication," explores the oddness and limitations of language-how we use words to demarcate pets from animal sources of food, for example-while "Ship of Theseus" hearkens to an ancient philosophical question about how identity changes over time. "In Defense of Vulnerable Men" offers a tongue-in-cheek rallying cry against men who take liberties with women's bodies, asking, "Does the town butcher ever declare/I'd prefer not to sell/that pink ground chuck/I just put on display/bound in shimmering cellophane?" The titular poem, "Jackie O. Suffers Two Husbands Before She Claims Someone Else's" reads like dark comedy, ending on an expression of intense longing: "Sliding a finder down the tuck behind/her knee, he whispers a reminder to them both-breathe." McEntee invokes a shape-shifting world in which an imperious daughter instantly "[contracts] into the shape of a child," and a woman reflecting on past lovers and their need for unburdening themselves speaks of her own reticence: "I've lodged my secrets/beneath the sand mound/of my breast./That spot's never borne/the mark of any ex." Sad, ironic-and ultimately hopeful-these poems introduce a startling new talent.

This debut chapbook, which explores loss, grief, addiction, and recovery, was a semi-finalist for the New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition and contains a poem selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2018.

In Crayon Colors for Serial Killers, Silverman has constructed something akin to a potion bag-a collection of juju text to keep the forces of darkness at bay-sometimes by lament, but more often by turning the dark archetype of male violence against women on its head. These subversive haikus and flash prose pieces are literary grenades. And, just as importantly, they exist in the realm of myth and collective imagery. While specific events-both political and personal-may have triggered some of these pieces, Silverman is writing more broadly. When a transformation comes that gives women their due-sexually, politically, and socially-this collection might go out of fashion. But, until then, this is writing that fights its way toward that outcome one little textual explosion at a time.

This collection of poetry and poetic prose holds a beautiful word-sketch of a continuing world that surrounds us despite a smearing cloud of pandemic. Outside the boundaries of fear and lockdown, the narrator helps us escape to a parallel world where squirrels, foxes, maples and cicadas thrive with equal significance to the eyes that care to notice. And, despite the boundaries for lockdown social revolutions take birth in the human world that keeps questioning the rights and wrongs, revising the old thoughts. The question of solitude remains to be asked-When this will be all over will the recurring dream return?-Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, author of multiple books including Plankton Dreams: What I Learned in Special Ed (Open Humanities Press)Gill's poems remind us how hope is a practice-a practice of the daily, the quotidian, the front porch. Part of this practice is learning how to notice and observe where national traumas intersect with individual ones. Reflections from the Front Porch implicates us because the collection refuses the convenience of looking away, of washing our hands of complicity. Gill invites us to think about how scale is felt and dangerous fantasies of distance, separation from what we think has no bearing on us but in fact actively constitutes our lives and our relations with others. And such relations are often non-human: mint, maple, cucumber beetles. Whole ecologies of hope, "beauty / in [their] lasting act[s]."-Travis Chi Wing Lau, Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College, author of Paring (Finishing Line Press)

A Certain Ache: Poems in Women's Voices is a double boon, because the notes in the book are, by themselves, a treasure of facts about well-known women and women we would do well to know. Their voices are here, rendered in excellent detail, in language groomed and thoughtful, with skill and the kind of attention they deserve. My current favorite is the poem in the voice of Mileva, the scientist who married Albert Einstein. I recommend this book most heartily!-Marjorie Saiser, author of Learning to SwimIn A Certain Ache, Bonnie Wehle amplifies a chorus of women's voices, revealing a shared daring and desperation in the interior lives of artists, scientists, explorers, and those without fame. Wehle's speakers transmute their griefs into art and discovery, finding that what they make can hold, but not undo, loss. Wehle's verse illuminates these women as they confront "the distortion of spacetime, / our laundry on the line," persisting through the commonplace and the transcendent alike. "Because / must," one speaker gasps out amid trials; without denying suffering, Wehle proclaims these women's drive to create and to endure.-Julie Swarstad Johnson, author of Pennsylvania FurnaceIn these poems, Bonnie Wehle has done one of the most powerful things poems can do: allow us to spend time with the dead. In doing so, she has resurrected something precious: the voices of women who challenged what was possible during their brief lives. These poems are a record of what we must not forget-the human dimensions of their struggle, the beauty of their boldness, and above all, how they manifest a singular, enduring belief.-Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center