Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

This poetry collection by an expert story teller captures ordinary or unexpected encounters between people, between human beings and animals. between generations, especially mothers and daughters, places where frenzy meets solitude, health meets illness, where rural landscapes meet modern California and New York, where modern love meets modern death. Here readers can recognize themselves in the significant meetings of our lives. Comfort and beauty rise from the tender portraits, hard truths told without bitterness, peace and beauty in the way the land comes alive. Other poets review this collection as "sensual, tender, of this earth." Molly Peacock calls Ms. Emerson "a new American pastoralist." Five award-winning poems are included in this book: "Beside Salmon Creek" (Healdsburg quarterly award, 2015); "First Day of Kindergarten and Eleven Years Later," (Allen Ginsberg Contest, 2015); "Following Hay," (Redwood Writers 2010); "Before AIDS Was a Word," (Nominations for Pushcart, Best of Net, Gemini Magazine, 2012, 2013); "Edna's Baked Goods," (Western regional award, Persimmon Tree, Maria Gillan, judge, 2014).

The Woman in Happy Dollar by Doug McHargue is deeply rooted in her southern voice, but with universal themes we're sometimes surprised we find in the aisles of Happy Dollar. Her poems have been called O'Conneresque, of the familiar, but also dream-like, filled with epiphany. Included in this poetry collection is a finalist for the North Carolina Poetry Society's Poet Laureate Award, "Women without Make-Up".

The poems in Things We Might Miss play with two main aspects of missing: experiencing loss (or being deprived), and failing to see-aspects echoed in, respectively, the book's front and back cover photos. But instead of seeing missing as altogether negative, the book praises it in one's affections as desirable-for example, it's arguably a good thing to be able to miss someone, and disagreeable to find a person's constant presence a form of browbeating, or a state where "respect fades/in obliged nearness/into a sort of stupor." Accordingly, these poems reiterate how absence can and should be alluring. The themes of distance and positive tension between people pick up on Kierkegaard's caution on total familiarity, as well as author Philip Wylie's complaint, "That's the trouble with love. People think it involves rights."

Called "a powerful selection of climate poetics," this book of 30 original haiku and photos from Iceland, Japan, Yosemite National Park and the author's home in Laguna Beach, California, bears witness to drought, rising tides, glacial melt, overtourism, air pollution, nuclear threats, automation and other issues facing our Blue Planet.Reviewers rave:"This collection pushes us to consider our changing world in playful and unexpected ways." --Linda Cabot, Artist, Ocean Advocate and Founder of Bow Seat Ocean Programs, Massachusetts"From her native domicile of California, and further afield into Japan and Iceland; through parched desert tracks, flowing waterfalls, a Monarch butterfly on the way from 'my milkweed hostel,' she continually startles." --Dr. Derek Coyle, Carlow College/St. Patrick's, Ireland"Her lines stun with beautiful simplicity, enhanced by her glorious photographs that bring them to life." --Ricki Mandeville, Co-founder and Editor, Moon Tide Press, California"Her delicate balancing of stillness and motion, word and picture, skillfully echoes our current eco-story, and gently asks us to listen, to look, and ultimately, to act." --Judyth Hill, Poet, Editor, Teacher and Mentor, Colorado

What is the Wind in the Cave? It's the title of James B. Nicola's third poetry collection, as well as the queasy feeling in your gut that accompanies love, loss, addiction, aging, and the like-and through it all, ultimately, triumph. "Love poems" abound-but each comes with a twist, whether of whimsy, wit, resilience, or . . . revenge.Many of these pieces are narrative (Nicola won a People's Choice award from Storyteller magazine) while others are metaphysical, metaphorical, or humorous. Stylistically they range from free verse to formal (he has been a featured poet at New Formalist). A Yale graduate, Nicola has also won a Dana Literary Award and, for his nonfiction book Playing the Audience, a Choice magazine award.But the wind whistles in many more hearts than those whose love has gone south. In one poem, for instance, Charlie Brown, who is now a well-adjusted adult, visits Lucy, who is not. A second offers a soul a premature glimpse of his name on a gravestone, while a crow caws and the wind wooshes. Yet another serves up a "Daddy" poem that Sylvia Plath never could have imagined. James B. Nicola's poems have appeared in the Antioch, Southwest and Atlanta Reviews, Rattle, and Poetry East. His nonfiction book, Playing the Audience, won a Choice award. His two poetry collections, published by Word Poetry, are Manhattan Plaza (2014) and Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016).Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer writes: "These poems are willing... to be wrestled by darkness, to be lost and unpetalled and burned. And Nicola writes them with such lush language, such subtle meters, that we find ourselves hypnotized." Meanwhile, best-selling author and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht (Doubt, Stay) calls Wind in the Cave "a weird and beautiful book."As per page 87, Risk the agony.... Risk the ecstasy. Feel every breeze on your moistened face ... stung by sweet storms.

Following the seasons from spring through the end of the year, Seasons of Change includes unusual takes on things like ladders, flowers, streets, and neighborhoods, as well as places like a native African bar and the Florida Keys, all looked at with insight, humor, and not a little pathos. With tributes to Ted Kooser, Charles Simic, Elizabeth Bishop, and Federico Garcia Lorca, and titles like "Rummage Sale," "October Farewell, "In the Keys with Maggie," and "Hotel Malawi," this collection will reward reading and rereading, as well as recommending to friends.

The Heart Is Not a Pump is a collection of poems that reads like a journal of confidences, mingled with poems that speak to the reverence of the human body and experience. From moments of heartache to ponderings on the physics of light and the beauty of anatomy, The Heart Is Not a Pump traverses the everyday divine.

Exit Wounds explores the genesis and aftermath of a destructive affair perpetrated by a predatory male university professor. The collection begins with poems providing the context of the woman's vulnerability, and continues with the initial seduction at an academic conference. With deep psychological insight into motivation and power relationships, subsequent developments complete a compelling narrative of a tragedy worthy of Puccini. Exit Wounds tells the story of a relationship, apparently perfect, which crashes, leaving enormous distress in its wake.

Lucid and accessible, The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling invites readers to enjoy the author's deft use of slant rhymes and expressive poetic forms. Its three sections move between inner and outer worlds, across the American landscape and the Pacific Ocean to Japan, China, and India. Birds, animals, woods, and waters frame the poems' topics: grief that arises from mistakes, illness, and death; the interests and insights gained from travel; and good-humored observations of daily experience. Fans of modern poetry will enjoy the range of styles found here. At time, the poems' spare frankness echoes William Stafford, or a sense of quiet appreciation evokes Mary Oliver, and the linguistic allusions can hint of Emily Dickinson, Richard Hugo, or Anne Sexton. Using imagery drawn from the author's knowledge of natural history, the poems trace an arc that encompasses the rich textures of life.

The Switch Yards, a book length poem, switches between observational meanderings to philosophical ponderings in a linguistic and narrative shifting landscape.

People go missing, literally or figuratively, from our lives-and Missing Persons Report: Accounts from the Mushroom Cloud details the stark aftermath in poetry. Readers follow a narrator who never gives up the search. Meg, writer of the book blog "A Bookish Affair," describes Missing Persons Report as "a gorgeous collection that evoked some pretty strong feelings... Many of the poems focus on relationships and how they drive us and the memories that we're left with after they are over… All that you are familiar with (the feelings, the longing, the pondering) feels new and fresh again."

Re-Write Men is packed with story-oriented, character-centered poems inspired by omens, haunted neighborhoods, and hospice patients reviewing their lives and seeing into the next world as they confront fate. Most of these slices of life crackle with drama in which opponents struggle toward revelation and characters deal with antagonistic dimensions of themselves. Other poems provide diversion from the gravity, focusing on music and the loving spirit of Black Labrador Retrievers. The collection traces a journey from corrosive doubt to limited grace. It begins with a narrator declaring "I don't need the Bible to show me Hell/It's right here in my hands." It visits a nursing home where a patient pleads, "Make us love ourselves and one another." The quest for cleansing concludes with a guilt-wracked loner proclaiming, "The sea-winds tore off/the festering lapels of my self-pity." The pleas and plights of men yearning to redeem loss-ridden lives will capture your ear and enter your heart.

Adam Berlin's The Standing Eight points beyond boxing and goes to those between-round places where an eight count is both reprieve and curse.