Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

Remember Polaroid photographs? Moments of time captured in a single picture, developed in minutes, as long as you don't shake the picture too hard and too fast. Many times in the past several years, Emily Vieweg's poems have earned comments like, "a photograph in words," and "a polaroid on the page." Frequently encouraging embracing the art in the everyday, Vieweg's but the flames explores the beauty of the mundane, the extraordinary of the ordinary, and finding inspiration through music, art, everyday activities, and both the ugliness and wonder of the human condition.Vieweg's poems in but the flames dance between the reality of mental health issues in "BiPolar Is," "Say Hello, Social Anxiety," "An open letter to my depression," and "Everything About This is Wrong." The bravery in telling-it-like-it-is and finding the humor in the irritating brings another awareness to surviving mental illness and sharing the experience in a way that is accessible to any reader.Woven between the anxiety and fear of living with mental illness are moments of relief, calm, levity and memories of innocent youth. Memories like "Jungle Gym" and "The First Friday in June" remind us to remember pleasant moments when engulfed in pain and anxiety. This collection of poems transports a reader through Vieweg's reality: trepidation, calm, fear, levity, yearning, loss, grief, anger, laughter, peace, and bravery. A wise person once made a statement akin to "one cannot be brave without fear." Vieweg is not fearless in this collection, she is brave. She is raw and she is real. She fears how the readers of the world will react to her view of our world and puts it out there anyway, in everyday language, so anyone may experience the beauty of the mundane."My goal, as an artist and as a poet, is to make what I see in the world available to other people."

From the diagnosis of a son's mitochondrial disease to the physical and emotional challenges of caregiving, Pilipino-American poet Brian Ascalon Roley taps into the personal experience of parenting a wheelchair user son and combines it with Philippine horror mythology to create harrowing narratives of a family set in California. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, award-winning author and publisher says, "Ambuscade by Brian Ascalon Roley transports you into the painful world of a father coping with a son's disability. It is a lament, a rage, and at the same time a love story between a father and his son. This is a wringing read."

"Born of "Roman blood and forged in Celtic fire," Everything Is Something Else is poetry as memoir as it seeks to explore key aspects of identity: the Italia, the Irish, and the Queer. This passionate and provocative collection spans 30 years and is a selection of new, unpublished, and previously published poems from the author's acclaimed 2009 chapbook, Supplications.The poet is a stor-teller, no doubt, with an impeccable ability to weave lyrical recollections with bold -and at times- cutting images. The book is divided into three sections -Irish, Italian, and Queer but memory is the connective tissue through this sprawling collection that reveals much about our human need for story-telling and self-reflection as much as our burning desire spiritually, intellectually, sexually, and emotionally for connection.D'Alessandro pays tribute to a variety of influences and forces in his life and poets he admires: "There Is Time Here" is a stirring nod to Jamaal May's "There Are Birds Here"; "Out Of Place" shares the title of the novel by Italian American and D'Alessandro's mento Joseph Papaleo; "The Sandbox, after the classic Edward Albee play -another of the D'Alessandro's mentors, is an ode to a dying parent; and the powerful "Mind Yerself" which is offered in thanks to the late Ciaran Carson and tells a woman's immigrant story while informing the reader that Mind Yerself is Irish for "I love you." Finally, the shortest poem in the collection. "Seeing Her Smile, Sometimes Never" gives a colorful nod to E. E. Cummings. As scholar and author, Pamela Rader wrote: "Franco D'Alessandro's poetry, instead of fracturing and alienating, unites and gathers both the personal and the collective human experiences as unique but shared experiences of love, friendship, passion, and loss. In the immediacy of its expression, D'Alessandro's poetry articulates both the palpable urgency to live and the pensive potency to reflect on the past and on what has been... (He) seeks a correspondence, similar to that of French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, between the earthly realm of human experiences to the interpretive realms of language."Italian-based, Irish writer/journalist Hugo McCafferty writes: "Franco D'Alessandro's poetry is the silver thread that weaves together the major events, places, people and themes of his life. His work has a sense of time and place, that the past is present within us and around us, through the deeply held memory of a mother's touch or the unending admiration of a father's square shoulders, we become that which we love. Ireland, Italy, and love are the themes that form the pillars of this work, the pantheon of a life lived with the passion of an Italian, the recklessness of an Irishman and the sensitivity of an artist. There is tenderness here despite having weathered the winter of life's harshness, there is not a hint of cynicism, but instead quiet ebullience that is a gift of hope to us all. To read and feel the poems in 'Everything is Something Else' is to walk the cobblestoned streets of Rome, or Galway or the sun-baked sidewalks of New York with him and to know that you too are home."

Selling the Family shares the reflections of a sole surviving family member as she sorts several generations of belongings for a final estate auction, a quintessential experience in rural America.The setting is a 33-acre property in southwestern Wisconsin, a forested coulee on the Mississippi River, but the story is reflective of any rural setting in the Upper Midwest. Nancy Kay Peterson recounts the deaths of her immediate family and watches an auctioneer's staff organize the sale of what to the family were thoughtfully acquired possessions collected over several lifespans. She sees childhood treasures tossed together for bundled bids, her father's WWII memorabilia appraised, gifts given laid out for re-sale, unsaleable household goods thrown into the trash. As the staff works, Nancy "saves" what she can by giving items away to friends - "grandmother's quilts and doilies, never used egg coddlers, silver appetizer forks, Norwegian sweaters." She picks up useful items like poster putty, but also rescues the unnecessary -- her sister's small wooden puffin and her brother-in-law's Norwegian bottle opener. As she watches the meaningful property in her relatives' eyes being transformed into merchandise to be sold or simply trashed, Nancy relives the memories she will never again be able to share with someone else who remembers them, too. Just before the auction, she strews the ashes of her sister and brother-in-law on the land they loved, and as she walks the property one last time, she examines the depth of her grief.While the story is melancholy, it's telling is honest, rather than sentimental, cathartic, rather than debilitating, and ends, as it must, on a thin note of joy and gratitude for the love once shared.

In Clearing the Mask, Gay Parks Rainville assembles a collage of lyric snapshots, each one poignantly rendered and vividly imagined. The discerning poet-speaker reflects on both personal history and the state of the world, and through her steady, unflinching gaze, demonstrates that the only way to live a life-with all its joys and heartbreaks, its fortunes and losses-is "not past but through." -Christine Kitano, author of Sky Country and Birds of ParadiseThis lovely collection of poems concerns itself with our fundamental realities-life, love, and death. Our hold on the first two is always tenuous; only the last is certain. And yet these poems also realize how our experience of these realities is blunted and coarsened by the lull of materialism, our American dream that all of life ought to be one smooth ride. Everywhere the poems in this collection note painful exceptions to such a myth. Our relative comfort, in other words, comes with a cost, perhaps a cost so great and myriad that the comfort is in the end unreal. This is a book riddled with implied questions the poems glide over, acknowledging our preference for a sense of innocence that isn't quite right. The glimpse of uncertainty here is certain and satisfying. -Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter, Gone and the Going Away, The Common Man, Bucolics, A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c., and Lawrence Booth's Book of VisionsIn the beautiful poem "Cohabitation," it's the working-class neighbor's dog that sets off the outdoor alarm system, whereas the fox in the woods seems a companion, a protector. This collection explores issues of ecology, nature and culture, isolation and community, with an authority grounded in the author's childhood in the "Cancer Valley" of West Virginia. It's full of what Virgil called "the tears of things": the village drowned under the lake created by a dam; the immensely talented college roommate Googled years later, only to find she has been sentenced to nine years in prison for fraud; the woman with dementia who finds her husband a "Perfect Stranger." This is a haunting, as well as a beautiful, book. -Alan Williamson, author of Franciscan Notes, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems, Res Publica, and Love and the Soul

In her tender and incisive debut poetry collection, Red List Blue (Semifinalist, Codhill Press Poetry Award), Lizzy Fox navigates love, loss, and anxiety against the backdrop of today's global environmental crises. Fox catalogues failed relationships and dying species, explores complicity in the rapid decline of the natural world, and meditates on the small and stubbornly hopeful, making Red List Blue both ode and elegy in equal measure. Poet Cynthia Huntington writes, "These poems...radiate a hard-earned love for this difficult world." Poems in the collection have been previously published in journals such as The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, and Puerto Del Sol.

Marjie Giffin's chapbook debut, Touring, traverses the landscape of America, family, and social inequities with observant detail. An encounter with a homeless woman on the steps of a Milwaukee church is just as thought-provoking as the poet's recollection of stepping past shivering homeless persons on the periphery of Harvard. Poignant reflections emerge from both a dusty drive through a ghostly Southwestern village and a middle-aged dip into a pristine Northern lake. A sense of others' entitlement arises when the poet faces restrictions against viewing a New England landscape in "Dead End."Long-ago love is experienced anew in "Back in '73" and heartbreak recounted in "The Potted Plant."A doting mother and grandmother, Giffin writes with obvious devotion to her offspring in poems like "A Place of Peace" and "Grandbaby." Sardonic humor flourishes in her retelling of traveling with adult offspring in "Backseat Rider," while the joy of road-tripping with friends is apparent in "Girls Trip."The title poem, "Touring," takes a step back in time to a favorite card game of Giffin's father, while the collection's ending poem, "Empty City," recreates the eerily quiet atmosphere caused by today's very real experience, the Coronavirus.Poems from Giffin's chapbook have also appeared in Blue Heron Review; Flying Island; Poetry Quarterly; Northwest Indiana Literary Journal; Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing; So It Goes: The Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Nos. 6 and 7; St. Katherine Review; The Lives We Live(d) In: An Anthology of Poems about Social Justice; and Tipton Poetry Journal.

Kristine Williams' first chapbook, Like an Empty House, examines the everyday, those things we often overlook. Through her poems, what others take for granted, becomes transcendent. Using language that is vivid, tactile, often visceral, her work offers us new ways to experience a familiar touch, wash the dishes, take a walk, and in doing so, shows us that common experiences can become a connection to a beautifully complex world. The poems in Like an Empty House explore raising children to adulthood and, ultimately, letting go. Through the metaphor of getting a tattoo with her daughter, the reader can't help but recognize that the pain of getting a tattoo is just one of many hurts that mothers experience. She easily moves from fixing cars in the garage to fixing herself after retirement, from standing in the snow in flip flops while her dog explores in the dark to standing while her husband points out an Eastern Bluebird against the snow.This is also a love story. Like an Empty House shares stories of the long-married with a keen eye, with honesty and openness, showing us that while there is still conflict and resentment, there is also still discovery, still heat and passion.Williams' poems from her experience in a Montessori preschool find meaning in a naptime routine and explore the impact of the opioid crisis in small towns in southeast Ohio.Williams brings us into the natural world that surrounds her in her home of Athens, Ohio and points readers to peepers in a pond or a truck shifting gears on an Appalachian highway. She invites us to stop and clearly see and listen to those things we might be tempted to rush past. Stars overhead become a place to wander. A trip to the road with a trashcan or walking the dog are a meditation. In examining the minutiae of the everyday, she expands the world so that we see our humanity, our connectedness, our vulnerability.In the end, the stories in these poems fill what might once have been an empty house with truths that the reader should not turn away from. Like an Empty House invites us to enter and promises that we will not be disappointed.

Kay Bell's poems in Diary of an Intercessor are hymns, songs, odes and elegies that grace the difficult subjects: tough childhoods, parenting, ancestry, race and class in America. Though the Bible is referenced, the poems create their own biblical tone; casting spells to ward off evil, protect the new generation and confess the truth in fierce and stark vernacular. In the land where Trayvon Martin was murdered, Jacob Lawrence painted the Great Migration and Langston Hughes inspired dreams, this poet is courageous and fearless with language and images to paint the streets and islands of the countries she has lived in and moved through. The call towards home the reader discovers, finally rests in the poems themselves. Bell is a traveller through time, family and ancestry and her poems are a call to follow her on that journey. -Michelle Valladares, Author of Nortada, the North Wind

There's a rope between two burning towers. One tower burns anxiously. The other tower (the left side of the brain) burns orderly. Randall is dancing on that rope. It is the motion-a footfall, a locomotive blowing hard, a wave-that keeps her from falling. An ecstasy is a song to motion, to ex stasis, and Randall belts it true enough to pop the deepest bass string on your Fender Squier guitar. -Barrett Warner, Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?These powerful poems erode our physical boundaries leaving us to explore mental illness as a patient and as a caregiver alternatively. With ferocity yet in a ceremony of revelation, Michele Parker Randall's A Future Unmapable artfully discloses the unfathomable struggle of helping a beloved come back from the brink. Honest and courageous, each poem is a study of the much-needed conversation of what it is like to live with and recover from such a destabilizing experience. -Didi Jackson, Moon JarIn A Future Unmappable, Michele Parker Randall explores the nakedness of mental uncertainty: What is real? what is not? when "unable to tell the dream-state from the wake-state / Try to free someone from inside a balloon." Muted tension screams in the torque of Randall's lines: "coiledspring / a snake" "between the wardscape / walls" "how many worlds we / fit in one day." These panoptic poems offer a view from the in-between lest any of us be too sure. -Tanya Grae, Undoll

In this debut chapbook, feline companions, nature, and imagination help the poems' protagonist and readers navigate different ages of loss by being mindful in the search for refuge. Better Living through Cats takes readers on a transtemporal excursion to meet ancestors, reflect on childhood, and face middle-age responsibilities. Throughout the pages, cats interact sweetly with each other and their humans. Some help quell anxiety and depression; others sit with grief. As metaphors for a range of human emotions, cats pad alongside generations of family members. Joy, fatigue, grief, awe, anticipation, and hope spring from the poems. When conditions pass from house to home as inherited culture, how can one negotiate the past and continuous change for better living? The poet escorts readers across the U.S. from Southern roots to a Midwest stopover to pine-filled Washington State. History unfolds in poetic lines as the author's language forges through troubled dreams to metered visions, contemplates gardens and woods, and searches to transgress constraints. A hopeful arc points to living fully by polishing one's essence-whether out in the world or at home with a cat. The chapbook's themes feature memory, place, home, agency, and resilience, all of which are central issues in author Clark A. Pomerleau's creative writing and historical study.

What happens if we imagine beyond the confines of what we are told is possible? This question runs through the hearts of the poems in Rachel Economy's The Origins of Streams. Glimmers of answers emerge in conversations and overlaps with animals, plants, the soil itself. The Origins of Streams invites the reader into sensory awakening as a human body within the bigger body of the world. Whether the topic is chronic illness, creation myths, heartbreak, or the ethics of big agribusiness, these poems queer and dissolve the (often artificial) separations placed between the human and non-human world. Love poems are populated with plants. Decomposition and the movement of matter become essential processes for reorganizing the world towards justice. Grief and loss offer richness and regrounding in ecological relationship between watersheds and human bodies. Food is a tapestry that grows and graces tables and words throughout. More than anything, these poems speak deeply to what being alive feels like, and what being alive could be. Moving from land-as-origin-story, through themes of dancing, apocalypse, animacy, and refuge, Rachel Economy immerses us in the body of now, and in the seeds of a fragmented and thriving future.

In his second full-length poetry book, On Razor-Thin Tires, Charles Halsted explores connections with parents and siblings, friends and neighbors, birds and nature, and reactions to the world he lives in. Central to his life is his choice of a career in medicine, an inspiration for poems on becoming and being a physician. Through the eighty poems in in this book, Charles Halsted reflects on each stage of life, from childhood to adulthood to aging.

Michael Beebe is a refreshing addition to the small club of contemporary poets who are infused with the traditions of philosophy. Beebe's stoic attitude and disarmingly vulnerable honesty make a distinctive and addictive mix, and they speak of male vulnerability in ways that are not often heard. These are poems worth taking in slowly, and repeatedly. -Annie Finch

Two years at an assisted living facility (as the primary caregiver of her favorite relative, a celebrated character actor) kept Judith Mary Gee at a very high emotional pitch. Following his passing, she returned to her own residence bearing a grief bordering on breakdown. Finding solace in music, dance, and various other art forms, Gee gradually resumed practice of her own longtime craft, writing poetry.Gee's work has appeared in Chautauqua and is scheduled to appear in The New Guard, as well as in the second volume of Global Insides, an anthology of work created during the current pandemic.Her poems depict unthinkable loss (of love, limb, life, lucidity) resulting from war, disease, or occupation in startling-sometimes fantastical-images.A Sarah Lawrence College graduate, Gee was a protégé of literature professor Harold Wiener, whose tales of corresponding with John Galsworthy, dining with Greta Garbo and Rudolf Nureyev, and mentoring Lesley Gore were inspirational, amusing, and indelibly imprinted on her memory. Having studied poetry with Cynthia Macdonald (Gee was her teaching assistant), Jane Cooper, and Jean Valentine, she believes her writing skills assist in self-healing.Now sheltering in place, like many of you, Judith Mary Gee offers her Edges of Wanting.

The poems of "what mothers withhold" are songs of brokenness and hope in a mother's voice, poems of the body in its fierceness and failings. Elizabeth Kropf's poems revel in peeling back silence, and invite us to witness a complicated and traumatic world that is also filled with love. -Cindy Huyser, poet and editor, author of Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems With these visceral poems, poet and mother Elizabeth Kropf has composed a chant of the vocabulary of vulnerability. From fertility to conception to birth-or not-and into motherhood, Kropf's recounting of her experiences compels the reader to enter and acknowledge the power of what mothers endure and withhold. -Anne McCrady, author of Letting Myself In and Along Greathouse Road

What could "Hats are the Enemy of Poetry" possibly mean? Absurdly, it invites the reader to put on her thinking cap. Or better, to go bareheaded into the book, the first poem of which is entitled: Emily Dickinson is not in. Please leave a message. What message? The reader will decide, as always. But at the least, she will be exposed to the elements. "Before hummingbirds, Sweetheart,/there was plutonium," as the final poem in the collection begins, ending "in the garden of a God/ we do not, cannot, comprehend,/ for what seems more than/ an instant, but less than eternity."

Loosely following a linear timeline from childhood to old age, Adler's story-like poems highlight the emotional core that lives within life's ordinary moments. Illustrating the delicate yet complex nuances of human relationships, Adler imbues with equal intensity her portrayals of both gut-punch and near-miss life events. Serving as backdrop and salve for the emotions the poems elicit, nature and food play soothing and colorful parts in this collection. Undressing the Heart is a book for anyone who's ever experienced love, pain, and hope.

Blending humor with pathos, The Pugilist's Daughter illuminates some of the complications inherent in a fateful family position as the daughter most emotionally enmeshed with a wayward father. Some of the poems like "First Night," "How Insomnia Runs Through a Bloodline," "Black Pearl," and the titular poem portray a childhood and youth scarred by sorrow and loss, while others, such as "Story," "It Was Like This," and "Vigil" trace some of the steps and missteps taken to unravel the Gordian knot characteristic of this position within an "electric" constellation. Buoyed by humor, blunt charm, and the desperate pursuit of serenity in impossible situation, Lowery's account charts a narrow path out of dangerous waters in poems such as "After My Seventh Christmas," "At Mass," "Greensfield Park, North Side, Age Thirteen," and "Childlike."A native of Central New York State-where she still spends part of her summers-Lowery sets most of the poems in the small industrial town of Johnson City, NY, or in her father's birthplace of Syracuse. Additionally, some poems refer to Texas, where the poet's father lived for a few years, held, as he phrased it "an economic hostage." The poet has lived in Texas and taught literature and creative writing full time for many years in the English Department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.This collection is the tip of the iceberg in what the poet hopes will be a full collection of poetry coming out in the next few years. Three of the poems in this collection ("It Was Like This," "A Man Takes a Drink, A Drink Takes a Drink, A Drink Takes a Man," and "I Never Said,") were first "made public" in Lowery's play A Heroine Free Summer, given an equity production in Houston by Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company in the spring of 2017. The California Quarterly (defunct for decades now) published "Married Off" as "Married," in one of its last issues, and "How Insomnia Runs Through a Bloodline" is forthcoming from Texas 7, (TACWT Proceedings). She wrote some of the earliest poems in this collection under the tutelage of poet Ruth Stone, her mentor and PhD dissertation director, at Binghamton University. Lowery's work has been influenced by the poetry of Sharon Olds, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop and many others. If she could write like Wallace Stevens, she would.

In this stunning debut collection, A Glint of Light, Fredric Hildebrand celebrates--with sadness, praise, and astute observations-nature, the seasons, and people among us. In short luminous poems, he reveals the extraordinary aspects of ordinary things.A native of Neenah, Wisconsin, Hildebrand weaves this rural setting into his work, paying tribute to such poets as Tom Hennen and Ted Kooser. "At the Polling Place" praises a small-town community. With powerful imagery, love of nature runs through "The Sound of Spring," "Above the Flambeau River," "Prairie Morning," and others. "On the Way to the Mayo Clinic," "Autumn Frost," and "A Funeral" explore the difficult themes of grief and loss, but in "How Many Mornings," "Psalm," and "Geese in April," Hildebrand finds grace and gratitude in the blessing of ordinary days.In the tradition of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, the language in A Glint of Light is spare and accessible. The collection opens with "At the Ojibwa All-Night Diner," which won honorable mention for the 2017 Mill Prize for Poetry. The final poem is "The Forest Trail," first published in ArtAscent. Poems in this collection have also appeared in Bramble, Millwork, The Raven Review, Right-Hand Pointing, and Verse-Virtual. This volume is Hildebrand's overdue introduction to a national audience.

Automotive explores how cars and roads shape our thoughts and identities. The poems in this collection form a memoir in errands and accidents, ordinary commutes and cross-country road trips.

"Dotty LeMieux's poems sing about life in diners and on streets and in the natural world, about resistance and the grace of acceptance. They are deeply felt and charming observations about our shared humanity." -Anne Lamott, best-selling author of Bird by Bird and Almost Everything"Each poem here, rich with the sights, sounds, and smells of our familiar everyday, brings us news of our own world we may not have seen as clearly before. With wit and abundant vision, Dotty LeMieux delivers a lively, insightful collection." -Jacqueline Kudler, author of Sacred Precinct, Sixteen Rivers Press, and teacher in memoir writing and literature at the College of Marin, Kentfield, California. Kudler received the Marin Poetry Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010

Gregory Loselle's new chapbook gathers the work that has occupied him most often in the last several years: observations of the animals among us, domestic and wild. In careful, often formal verse, he draws on direct and reported experience to isolate and analyze moments of reflection, elaborating on the moral significance of our experiences with nature. News stories of remarkable encounters with nature, scientific reports, and simple, backyard observations stress the proximity and importance of animate life around us.