Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

Bees in the Attic is a collection of poems that elegize and celebrate an arc of lasting friendship. From a dying man we learn something of how to live; remembrances of playful humor, heartfelt hopes, and the constancy of mutual connection. Making sense of grief requires a willingness to pay attention-to words, gestures, and the subtle cues of changing seasons. These poems are made of woodgrain, walls, doors, hinges, and all the raw materials that give us shelter. Sturdy structures contain the lives and hopes of characters within, while beyond our doors flowing waters insist that we move ever forward.

Regal and eerie, Clare Welsh's Chimeras recalls early English poetry: its short line, alliterative phrasing, and lore. However, this abbreviated bestiary of the fantastic and common, the living and dead-swans, wolves, deer, koi, and Wind Horses-traverses a contemporary world, at times ordinary, at times post-apocalyptic dystopia. The young speaker tries to find her place here-to distinguish, if distinguishable, self from artifact in "a selfie next to the partially exposed bone. -Carolyn Hembree, author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a PlagueChimeras invokes an "alchemy" that turns the "shit" of quotidian life into the "gold" of, or an aspiration to, song. These poems are taut, darkly humorous, and edgy. Clare Welsh stands on the threshold of a luminous career. -Richard Katrovas, author of Mystic Pig

Skate/Glove is a romance with the worlds of roller derby and mixed martial arts, where poetry and prizefighting intersect.

Sea Fever explores the longing one often feels for home after a long absence or after having been torn away before she was ready. It is a journey others can relate to even if their heartfelt home is not the sea.

Nature and nostalgia dominate the dreamy narratives at work in this poetry collection. There is subtlety, sadness, beauty, and glimpses of passing enlightenment and truth. These are poems that face fears and transcend into sound realizations as we all join this mortal journey, ever seeking solace and some sort of understanding.

Piercing the Veil is a collection of autobiographical mystical poetry that captures the essence of contemporary Sufism experienced from the feminine perspective. At a time of disheartening religious tensions and a growing discourse of ethnic misrepresentations in the United States, this collection crosses borders and religious traditions and speaks to the universal heart and soul. The poems appeal to both mature spiritual travelers and readers new to the spiritual path who seek deeper spiritual contact, inner peace, and personal consciousness. The reading process takes the literary traveler on a rich and heartfelt journey; the poetry spans a wide range of human experiences by opening a window to subtle ecstatic mysticism in one poem, then delving into one of life's inevitable challenges with wisdom, patience and spiritual understanding, in another. This experience creates an opportunity to cultivate more understanding and tolerance of both self and others. It offers a penetrating glance into the world of Unity and is an invitation to remember that we are all brothers and sisters of one human family. Piercing the Veil bids us to dive within the heart, the self and the soul to perhaps emerge as the new mystical being that our world is in dire need of.

The Taste of Blood is a modern Cain-and-Abel tale that casts the speaker (sister) in conflict with her younger brother, and it leads readers through the bewilderment, outrage, and outright rage of a first child mourning the loss of her birthright-her parents' exclusive love-to an emotionally compromised son. In poems that forsake easy redemption for expression of stripped, painful truths, this collection takes us into territory few have the courage to explore: sibling rivalry so deep it feels apocryphal and universal, biblical, and pagan. It's a modern Cain-and-Abel tale that casts the speaker (sister) in conflict with her younger brother, and it leads readers through the bewilderment, outrage, and outright rage of a first child mourning the loss of her birthright-her parents' exclusive love-to an emotionally compromised son. What begins as childish resentment and jealousy deepens, along with the parents' deaths and the brother's descent into mental illness, into something more brooding and dark, in equal parts fear and primal, involuntary love. The writing is spare, crisp and utterly without sentiment and renders truths we sometimes flinch from in a book that is chilling, powerful, honest, and will not be easily forgotten. -Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive, God Seed and All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song

In Once Familiar, Colorado poet Barbara Ford surveys the human landscape with her small binoculars. She looks in closets for the impossibly lost and the second smile. She pricks her finger with the eye of a needle, dares to seek transcendence while smoking a cigarette, fails to wash away the stain of sacrificial blood. In this collection of poetry she holds a series of conversations standing in the quicksand of the past and the ever so slippery present. Each poem finds its place in the heart of the reader who cherishes the interplay between the known and the never-to-be-known, and those who ponder the difference between understanding and acceptance, which the poet repeatedly discovers are not the same thing at all.

Green is a fictional minimalist long-poem narrative chapbook that shows the ways in which a grandmother's house can help her grandson realize not only his grief but also his life and the potential for love. The verse undulates through time and different emotional nuances, using "green" as an extended metaphor for grief and "blue" as a metaphor for blessing, comfort, and hope.

Peculiar Motion is an intimate collection that spans a lifetime, from first love to encroaching age. Kirk is an accessible poet who also manages to jolt the reader with powerful language and an often sharp sense of humor.

Holonym is a collection of contemporary poems by award-winning Kentucky poet, Trish Lindsey Jaggers.Holonym, from the title poem, is the relationship of the "whole" that is created by its "parts." (Flower is the holonym of petal, stamen, and pistil; tree is the holonym of trunk, branch, and limb.) It is a "semantic relation"-words, phrases, images, and what they represent-connotations that signal denotation. Several interconnecting themes arise in these poems, among them: loss through war, loss of connectedness and other deficiencies, and discovery of self in seemingly insignificant objects where the objects become the holonym for the self and its missing parts.These poems seek to solemnize loss and recognition in the prodigious (earth's history in stones, fireworks' harkening to war, those small things left in a room to signify a life lived) to the infinitesimal (death of a petal, tiny antiques). Deceptively simple; decidedly complex-all pieces semantic to the "holonym."

The Walking Dead: A Lyric explores how definitions of survival, and the power dynamics that inform them, are depicted on the record-breaking TV show The Walking Dead, paying special attention to gender, class, race, and one's previous relationships to legal systems and other institutions. Crisis and anxiety permeate the poems, reflecting a context in which individuals and their relationships to power continuously transform in an ever-shifting environment.*This book has not been approved, licensed, or sponsored by any entity or person involved in creating or producing The Walking Dead, the TV series, graphic novels, or video games.

Almost Somebody by Daniel Roessler is a chapbook of poems about the human struggle to feel valued and the journey to become someone with purpose. It dincludes poems about people who are often overlooked, misunderstood and marginalized in our society. Almost Somebody balances the external observations about others with introspective poems about the internal fight for self-worth and self-aceptance.

Dianna Henning's evocative poems do not flinch a moment from their subject matter. These are poems that are mythical, reverential and mysterious, as well as hard won. Dianna wants to become the air the fox breathes, enter the spirit world of animals. She acknowledges that "memory is a dicey thing, /a stone that sinks/to settle where it can't be seen," yet, paradoxically, it is memory that propels these beautifully written poems into the heart of the reader.

Compass Rose traces a significant year in the poet's life; the poems delineate an arc of death into life.  The collection begins with the poet's mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer.  It follows her mother's illness, death, and burial and remembrance.  The chapbook delights in the celebration of life and the unexpected joys to be found amidst deep sorrows.  The poems are rooted in love, landscape, and journey.  They delight in the power of the word, and in the poet's discovery of the written word and its ancestors, such as her poem, "Listening to Seamus Heaney."  Ultimately, Compass Rose finds diurnal power in the mundane, power in the extraordinary passage of life into death, and solace again by the healing laps of the ocean.  The poems express reverence for the power of human life, for the enduring bonds between parents and children, between mothers and their mothers, between mothers and their sons and daughters.

In "Stamped," Emma Alford creates poems in response to postcards from her late best friend, capturing the nostalgia associated with a friendship cut short too early. These poems pull readers into the friendship between these two young girls.