Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

With concise, vivid language, Bob Brown's poetry brings us into the prison of hard time. We sit with him on "small plastic chairs"...learning the yearnings of the incarcerated. The violence in these lives is not avoided in the poems. Yet, Brown's compassion and truth from these encounters resonates. If there is a theology of hope among the stories, then maybe coming to God will turn a life around. Hard Times: Poems of Enclosure is a succinct and compelling look at life behind the bars. These poems reveal in stark language those ...Who are "The Unknown." "The Unnamed."-Sandra McGarry The root of the word "despair" is away from hope. And yet these poems, poems of empathy, build human bridges toward hope, though never with ease. As the poet visits men in jail, responding to a request from his parish priest, he wonders, "Could they see my past in my face-years clean and sober now?" Into this place of imprisoned men, a place where time is hard, comes a visitor bringing word of forgiveness, but listening deeply, to the story and to the story under the story. Of the drunk driver, the murderer, the addict, the abuser. Stories in which every choice made has made a difference. And it becomes clear that the contact the poet makes is essential to him as well. In one case, a murder is interrupted by a man who arrives, knowing he needed to be there. Someone who left, "Unknown. / Unnamed." In another, the visitor doesn't know the outcome: "I never learned / the disposition / of his case." The poems themselves are largely narrative and simple on the surface; they reflect the spare setting. But as the reader enters the poems, much is revealed about what it means to be human. When a meeting is interrupted by a lockdown, the poet writes, "Also locked down, / I prayed for him." The interruptions occur often but do not deter the visitor, who offers his humanity, compassion, attention, and belief.-Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan, & it had rained, Thresh & Hold, and Swan, What Shores?I'm grateful for these poems in which Bob Brown chronicles his time as a lay religious counselor serving prison inmates. His reports offer sustained insight into how we come to be who we are, insight into the souls of those who daily return to relative freedom and those who may never be free again. Along the way, the poems imply we might well ask ourselves which is which.-ROMTVEDT

Betsy Littrell's Dragon in my Purse weaves into gold the clutter of contemporary American life, the ambiguities of family, the messiness of homes animated by actual people living actual lives. Littrell's poems summon an achingly sensual picture of motherhood, give glimpses-almost confessional, at times-into the life of a woman navigating her desires and their cultural and biological roots. The rehearsal of imagined play with a daughter who never was ends with a body crumpled on the floor, with blood and flowers and the scent of baby powder. Sensitive to the magic of the quotidian, the resonances of little moments too often neglected in the rush of our contemporary moment, Littrell testifies to the power of poetic knowledge and its ability to animate the world, to give form to chaos, to create life-or a life-in only twenty-two poems.-Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. Professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Diego State University and author of Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry (Wayne State UP, 2007) & Strong Measures (Make Now, 2007)In pastel tones, Betsy Littrell captures the clarity and urgency of care in poems softly wrought and beautifully folded. With meticulous imagery and a sensorium embedded in floral, wood, and crepuscular realms, the poems in this collection move us gently beyond individual self to collective need. From the "memory center" to the "washing wool" to the beloved "freckled face," these heartfelt songs call us to recall how "the lone pine smells like an entire forest," how deeply the forest depends on the single tree. -S$, Penn Sound, 1913 , Leave Your Body Behind, The Yesterday Project, Poetry Foundation

Meg Reynolds has found her voice in the niche genres of diary comics and visual poetry. She excels in both elements of this hybrid genre: her skills as a writer and artist come together to form this powerful book. The content is vulnerable, honest, and effective. The characters are amusing, tragic, and sexy. The speaker sings and shouts from the page through tears and laughter and over spilled wine and ink. She reaches out to the reader with tenderness, loneliness, and agency. Meg's book will find its place on my shelf of visual poets, in a position of honor with the texts of Edward Gorey, Lynda Barry, Maira Kalman, and Bianca Stone. Each page is a poetic diary entry, illuminated with Meg's eerily beautiful drawings. These passages are ripe with puns, double entendres, tales of loss, and evidence of personal growth. This is a stunning accomplishment.-Frances Cannon, author of The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big Little FrankMelancholy and wry observation pervades the pages of Meg Reynolds's collection, A Comic Year. Part captain's log, part comic, part memoir and part instruction manual, this litany of days takes us on a journey of honest reflection. The candid voice, hilarious and adept at pointing out what it's like to be a poet and artist dating, is paired with sharp fine-line drawings, with enchanting detail and composition. Meg Reynolds is a natural comics artist, with the sensibility of a poet. Here we get the best of both worlds. -BIANCA STONE, author of The Mobius Strip Club of GriefA Comic Year is intimate, patient, and breath-taking. What is on the surface the story of a year in the life of a woman following a breakup unfolds and explodes into gorgeous layers of complexity, masterfully weaving together themes of love, desire, safety, family, poetry, time, and longing. Poems and drawings are at one turn heartbreaking, and then suddenly very funny, and then awe-inspiring and back again. Altogether, it is an indescribable triumph; a book that is just as much about everyone alive as it is about the author. Reynolds has given us a true gift.-Sophie Lucido Johnson, author of Many LoveVirginia Woolf wrote, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" in A Room of One's Own. Meg Reynolds wrote, "I'm on my own again...My love for myself achieved delicate (precarious) purchase when I bought myself a sandwich: a BLT. Obviously". Reynolds was not afraid of releasing "the flying doubt monkeys from their brain cage" in her poetry comic, while she was a castaway in an urban desert. The documentary was a catharsis of sorts, with her and her micron pens & graphite drawing pencils. "To portray something in art is to worship it and make record. Here, I make an icon of my bedroom window. I pray to this close thing." I felt her energy in this book -survive- and I'm glad she did.-Naoko Fujimoto

A thoughtful and accessible debut, Even in the Slums of Providence explores elements that define our lives-love, family, work, aging, faith. Through these poems, Larry Pike travels a long arc of experience to appreciation and understanding of the gifts, great and small, we receive: wearing thin a lawn during a neighborhood ball game; dealing with a rugged, worldly coworker on a first job; savoring mint juleps with dear friends; watching a grandmother admire her teenaged grandson on Christmas Eve; mourning a friend's father at a socially-distanced funeral. Readers will find much in their own lives reflected in the emotion and humor of these poems. Born in Georgia and raised in North Carolina, Pike has lived in Kentucky for forty-five years. The strong Southern emphases on home and place clearly influence his work. He employs a keen eye to enlarge and enliven ordinary events (enjoying ice cream at a sidewalk café), as well as the harrowing (facing a wild, illegal border crossing) and majestic (viewing a nighttime Space Shuttle launch at close range). Even in the Slums of Providence is a warm, unpretentious collection. It celebrates, sometimes wryly, common occurrences, such as learning to drive, an afternoon at the movies or watching newlyweds hunting for a home on HGTV, going with one's dad to buy dress shoes, and running a routine errand. The poems marvel at special times that connect us to one another and the world around us. They also help us consider critical life questions, like the injustices we incite and endure and our mortality. Even when contemplating difficult themes, these verses reveal a grateful, inquisitive observer happily at work. The poems are grouped in three sections. The volume begins with "In the Driveway," which won the 2003 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Award, and includes the 2017 George Scarbrough Prize winner, "Wildflower Walk." The book's title comes from a line in the closing poem, "On Seeing the Van Goghs in Chicago." Poems in this collection have appeared in a number of journals, including Better Than Starbucks, Capsule Stories, Cæsura (web edition), Exposition Review, Fathom Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, Jelly Bucket and River and South Review, and several anthologies, including Heat the Grease, We're Frying Up Some Poetry and the New York Quarterly Foundation's Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith.

Faith Paulsen vividly captures the intimacies, secrets, and sorrows between beloved family members and friends. In the midst of losses, wonder and compassion abound: a hummingbird is a "trick of the eye" that evokes the speaker's mother sipping tea as it "savor[s] rosewater" in a "call to prayer." In a meditation on a wondrous invention designed to measure every shade of sky, a voice urges, "Make my body an instrument to measure the blues." A mother who transforms her grown son's bedroom into an office lingers in memory and longing until "Missing him / is the dervish bell she whirls in. / Missing him is its own language." Even as her poems lament "Losses [that] swim away / like minnow / as we try to count them," Paulsen's contemplative poems resonate deeply with love and the vibrancy of life.-Dilruba Ahmed, author of Bring Now the AngelsOpening with a pastoral awhirl in whooshing and lush specific detail, Cyanometer grounds readers firmly in the now and gives us poems of presence and attention. We move from now to past, from intimate family moments to times of historical import. A collection so seamlessly organized, I urge readers to read from beginning to end at least once-no skipping around. Poem follows poem on a music-drenched journey from the present to the past and back, from a poignant moment of imagining the future minus a dying mother, to a childhood memory of watching that same mother pin up her hair with its scent of Breck shampoo. The choice to turn a grown son's bedroom into an office becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to miss, or be missing, a study of absence that is its own kind of presence. In Ode to a Fossil, Paulsen brings us an outlook,/ layer on layer/on layer,/a deposition of sediment//mudstone, siltstone, redwall. This is the vista of Cyanometer-a deposition of layers of memory, observation, and, ultimately, well-earned wisdom.-Liz Abrams-Morley, Author of BeholderThe title, Cyanometer, forms the conceit for Faith Paulsen's book of poems that marvel at the many hues of looking inward and looking back. Urgent images and quick flashes of narrative are given in a language so vital and attentive that the strictures of grammar cannot hold back the rush of sense memory and sudden insight into the nature of self seen from "all directions." What capacious observations of her own self are refracted through those of the rabbit, the elephant, the Marianas Trench, her friends, family and, in the final poems of love and loss, her mother. Like the dragonfly of Pompeii which, "with one beat of its lucent wings / left its mark," so Paulsen leaves hers in poems of reflection, lament, and delight.-J. C. Todd, author of Beyond Repair

In Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips, Melanie Hyo-In Han asks what it means to be an outsider to both language and place while returning the reader-cum-witness to the house of poetry. In plain language Han's poems pack and unpack the tender complications of the speaker's puzzling through national belongings whether in Korea, Tanzania, or the United States. The migrating body thrives in rainy seasons, in heartbreak, in alienation, all while baring the intimacy of presence and poetic line.-Rajiv Mohabir, author of Cutlish and The Cowherd's SonThis stunning and moving chapbook puts a map in your hands as you travel from Morogoro to Marrakech, from Korea to Kenya, retracing your steps back home. Melanie Hyo-In Han's mastery of imagery and form demonstrates a playfulness with memory without shying away from the heaviness that often comes along for the ride. Each poem offers an invitation to explore family and place with an elegant assuredness, a tender guide. Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips not only asks, "Can I Roll, Slice, Stack Memories?" but also, "at what cost?"-Livia Meneghin, author of Honey in My Hair

Poems from a life spent up close and personal with nature chronicle humanity's effect on the earth, and just as importantly, the earth's effect on us. A clear-eyed, and open-hearted reckoning with contemporary life in the Anthropocene.

In Which Will Change the Other More? with humanity and dignity, Barbara Boches renders encounters between cultures. These meetings take place in a variety of settings: outside a silk shop in China, in church basements where the speaker teaches ESOL to immigrants and survivors, at a hardware supply company during the swelter of a Florida summer, among others. In each scene the poet records without judgment both moments of connection and moments of missed connections. In "The Asylum Seeker," for example, as the speaker struggles to overcome her resistance to accept her student's painful story, she acknowledges "Our wall, only in part//from different tongues. Other/bricks are mine," and bears witness as the woman "sinks from chair/to floor, her fist like a silent/gavel, up and down." These finely crafted poems all ask, "which will change the other more?" and demand that we be open-hearted and courageous enough to entertain that question without rushing toward an answer.-Kathleen Aguero, author of After That, poetry faculty at Solstice low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative WritingA boundary breaking work, Which Will Change the Other More, homes in on a Beijing alley silk spinner, an urban women's shelter, into the life of a 12th century Chinese divorcee poet, middle school purgatory, and chases down a parrot and runaway "who reeked/ of Marlboros and elephant craps." Boches, a free verse poet, works in a few brilliantly executed hybrid formats, including a metamorphic pantoum, a play/poem in three acts, and multilingual poems that know no borders. It begins "in a basement/ garden of sorts," and ends staring at a WWII "beach with Patton's/ men" snapshot with her closeted uncle on his deathbed murmuring that "Sex isn't/ important at my age." Marvin Bell said that "poetry is a mature art." Linda Pastan said that poets in their middle years write brilliantly of childhood. Boches is a poet of the first order who can tackle anything. This collection is the reason I read poetry.-Roger Weingarten, author of The Four Gentlemen and Their Footman, Premature Elegy by Firelight

In her 4th poetry chapbook, The What of Underfoot, Julia Blumenreich continues to explore through striking painterly images, original forms and direct address the effects of grief, loss, abuse, world politics and the relationship of nature to our lives and the lives of children. There is great sorrow at the death of her husband from a long illness and the unexpected suicide of her only sibling, a brother.There is great love and respect for the 4th graders she's taught for over 30 years and for the natural landscape which sustain her. Read these 27 richly lyrical and image-laden poems and be transported to another approach to understanding the complexities of our world: life, death, violence, abusive parents, the pandemic, the rights of children, and the power of the nature. Her background as a painter and teacher adds an original voice to these powerful poems.

Desire's unexplainable swings between grasping and letting go-such are the divergent courses of this collection. Short rhythmic pieces drenched with the moodiness of lust's confusions as well as the body's clear ache, are interspersed among longer free verse works which tell the stories of lovers in layers of loving and leaving. This is as much a book about desire's sighs as it is about its threads of sorrow. "Your living risks all procedure- / For this moment / Unbehaved." From Something in the Living These poems are conversations between women and men, between a woman and the landscape of her days and nights, between desire's flood and its flight. From the sensuous wanderings of both a woman's longings and the freedoms of her inner life, Jessica Rigney's poems ease us into the intimate space where one is given the choice to grasp or to let go. Both are equally satisfying.

"With ternura profunda Jennifer Rivera sings of our lonely migrations as she documents the bonds of love and the mirage of memories that form and re-form the lives of those who leave. A heart-felt and important debut."-Ana MenendezIn La Interseccion, her first book, Jennifer Mariela Rivera's poems move fearlessly into a world that desperately needs them-to remind us that courage is contagious, language is revelation, and that one young poet sharing her words on the page can light a new path and even open a heart. I recommend Rivera's work both for its gravity and for its play. It is, simply, a joy to read. -Maureen Seaton, author of Sweet WorldIn this first book of poems, Jennifer Rivera navigates both the public and private realms as an extranjera, a woman, and an artist. "I come from black volcanic ash," she passionately asserts, while diving into torn allegiances as "neither immigrant nor American." In "Two Men Walking a Breast," inspired by poem of the same title by Maureen Seaton, and "Wide-Eyed," inspired by Pablo Neruda, she exposes her deep and broad poetic links, as well as her search for validation. "To write is to think," she tells us and indeed her work does just that and much more. This collection by a promising new poet is a must read for its candor, authenticity, and artistry.-Carolina Hospital, author of Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks

After losing two children, the speaker of these poems writes of her deep suffering with openness; and when read one after another, along the trajectory of these poems, hope peeks through-in the form of a lost part of the speaker, a fire-breathing woman who may bring understanding, and in the form of these lines: 'I think there's / still a chance / for me / to believe / in something.'"-Ashley Inguanta, author of The Island, The Mountain, & The Nightblooming FieldIt is rare to find a collection of poems that is both accessibly frank and heartbreakingly true. With her colloquial turns of phrase enmeshed with breathtaking lyricism, J. Andersen's Hot Mess captures the brutal grief of generational trauma and the struggle for stability-in relationships and with oneself-amid concurrent child losses. Andersen doesn't pull punches or pretend that things will magically become better; instead, her poems steep into pivotal moments of conflict and discovery. In each snapshot poem, Andersen expertly distills moments of pain, absence, and even tentative hope and healing with recurring metaphors grounded in the Earth and reaching for the cosmos. These immersive confessionals paint the portrait of an unsteady life rife with pain and potential. Aptly-named, Andersen's cathartic collection serves as an anthem for anyone striving to hold it together.-Leslie Salas, editor of Other Orlandos and co-editor of Condoms & Hot Tubs Don't Mix

"Radical empathy," Jeanie Thompson, author of The Myth of Water, a book of poems written through the persona of Helen Keller, describes the process of work like her own. "Historical persona poetry" is not new, but especially significant in an age in which experts decry the lack of fellow feeling among us and its dark consequences. The Whited Air richly imagines and expresses what it would have felt like for a teenaged girl to leave her father and their farm on her own to join a legion of such girls working in Lowell, MA, at the textile mills, in more contemporary terms, finding oneself in a world utterly unfamiliar, a world that no longer feels like home.The protagonist Mary Paul, a real girl, is experiencing firsthand the great shift in 19th-century America from a rural world of home industry and barter to the economy and factories of the Industrial Revolution. She is working hard and long in a way almost beyond our ability to imagine. But that is the task of The Whited Air. And as exhausted as she is, she is still able to aspire to a more intellectual life, to spiritual fulfillment, even to living in a utopia. The fictional Irish mill girl, Brigid, counters and expresses anger at being invisible to girls like Mary though working alongside her, to the extreme bias the Irish faced upon immigrating here, the alien feeling of being a devout and Irish Catholic among Protestants, finally, a longing for the familiar.The original inspiration for this book is Andrew Hudgins' book about Sidney Lanier, After the Lost War, another group of deeply imagined poems about a historical figure. Mary Paul was not a poet like Lanier whose voice was heard in his own time. I hopeThe Whited Air ensures that her voice, as imagined, and representative of that of so many women, will now be heard.

"Veronica Schorr's Conscious Blue is a book of self-revealing- not of self-discovery, but of discovery of how the self is seen. Consequently, it is also a book of other-revealing. And Schorr reveals with a keen eye. These are thoughtful poems, rooted to an uncommon depth in love, and salutary in a moment when a good deal of what has been called love has proven itself to be shallow." -Shane McCrae, author of Sometimes I Never Suffered and The Gilded Auction Block"Veronica Schorr's poems are kaleidoscopes. Patterns form, shift, and shatter, revealing intensely-hued facets of human connection. She nails the angsty attachment of teens and elders, the awfulness of office banter, the itchy weight of being young, female, and constantly under scrutiny. Most of all, though, these poems strike me with the brilliant queer epiphanies of coming to know one's brightest self though love." -V. Penelope Pelizzon, author of Of Vinegar Of Pearl and Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone is Time"It is rare, indeed, for a debut book to contain more than a few wonderful poems and equally rare to discover a voice that is both unique and infinitely human. This book happily shatters both of these notions. It's quite amazing how Veronica Schorr continually reinvents, from poem to poem, herself as poet. And while her poems are centered, have gravity and are grounded in the real world, they are filled with the unexpected and often arrive at a new and heartfelt vision of the world. This is only the beginning of an important voice; you should listen." -Bruce Cohen, author of Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X-Rays"This debut works with every breath to affirm the power of love. Sometimes narrative, wickedly hybrid, often voice-driven, experimental, smart, and importantly here-and-there really quite comic, this little book gives us a new voice against the darkness." -Adrian Blevins, author of Appalachians Run Amok¿

Inspired by the tenet of chaos theory that small changes in initial conditions can spark great consequences, the poems in this chapbook exist at the intersection of the environment and politics. With toughness and tenderness, Little Victory calls out dangers of denial in the seats of power and offers hope and energy to face them by celebrating little victories of connection and wonderment.

Shaman Sky's first collection is an exploration of mood tempered by the joy of poetic form-its dance of word, idea, and sound. Whether accepting an "Invitation via Fortune Cookie" or preparing for "Lent in the Time of COVID" these poems operate through the technology of grace. It's a book that is playful in style but has great heart and depth.

Lucinda Marshall's debut poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self, explores our inherited understanding and experience of illness, death, grief, and sense of place.In poems that she began to write during the final years of her parents' lives, Lucinda Marshall's debut poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self, is an exploration of aging, illness, and death, as we witness them in the lives of our elders and loved ones, of grieving and ultimately the impact this heritage has on our sense of identity and place as we in turn age.The title poem of the collection was included in the Maryland State Arts Council's "Identity" exhibit in 2021 and "Winter Beach" was the first-place winner in Montgomery Magazine's 2019 "Montgomery Writes" contest.

Join Meredith Heller as she immerses herself in nature to discover the metaphors that help us navigate and illuminate our human journey.Her poems offer a rich, lyrical, and intimate trail guide of animism, where rocks speak in tongues/ crickets gossip/ the river sings her morning aria/ and an osprey plays two high notes on his golden coronet.Heller casts a spell that transforms herself and her readers into a deeper understanding of our part in the interdependence of all life.True to her poetry, she asks the important questions that are left humming in our hearts, "What kind of watermark will you leave?"Follow her, or better yet, chase her deep into the wood, now, as she learns and shares the ultimate lesson of the river.

Join Meredith Heller as she immerses herself in nature to discover the metaphors that help us navigate and illuminate our human journey.Her poems offer a rich, lyrical, and intimate trail guide of animism, where rocks speak in tongues/ crickets gossip/ the river sings her morning aria/ and an osprey plays two high notes on his golden coronet.Heller casts a spell that transforms herself and her readers into a deeper understanding of our part in the interdependence of all life.True to her poetry, she asks the important questions that are left humming in our hearts, "What kind of watermark will you leave?" Follow her, or better yet, chase her deep into the wood, now, as she learns and shares the ultimate lesson of the river.