Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

MAKE SHOW, Robin Lee's third chapbook, can best be described as a nocturne: a work suggestive of the night. In this collection Lee serves up a tightly integrated series of mysterious, dreamlike, fractured-narrative poems that explore some of the inevitable dark elements of - as he puts it in The Attic - "every full-lived life." It is a dream, a dream we share as these elements are examined, processed, and integrated. It is a pleasure to join the poet on this wondrous and engaging journey.

Preserve, Susan Kolodny's second collection, was inspired by encounters with wildlife and humans in the preserves of Southern Africa. Brooks Haxton writes, "Noted with such vivid precision, the individuality of each of these animals, and of each of the human encounters, awakens the deepest attention. Kolodny has turned her imagination to the fundamental work of survival, survival of the heart and mind, and of the living world that sustains us. These poems move me to tears." Elizabeth Robinson writes, "In these poems, awareness has an animating grace…". And Susanne Dyckman: "...this is a precise poetry, one in which we are asked to 'always newly see….'" Kolodny's vividly and accessibly conveyed encounters in the parks of Botswana and Zambia gain poignancy because many of the animals she observes and takes delight in are increasingly endangered as is their world and our own. Whether she is writing about a rhino beetle or an elephant, she is, as Janet Holmes remarked about Kolodny's first collection, After the Firestorm (Mayapple Press, 2011), "… a brilliant observer of the natural world…." This second book, Robert Thomas notes, "…becomes a Preserve she creates to save a world whose survival is at risk."

"Weave me a song that will break your heart," demands the mead hall patron in the opening poem of Songs from the Shaper's Harp. Songwriter and poet, Roberta Schultz, shapes her plaintive memories of working class family life into singable myth.

Polished, condensed, wordcraft. Situations and scenery closely observed and incisively described. Rich in imagination. Encompassing youth to old age and life-changing moments in between. Deals with human issues of connection and flight, chaos and order.

heliophobia, a collection of poems, opens with a Nereid on the verge of death, closes somewhere between the orgiastic rapture of a rave and an ecstatic experience of midnight meditation, and pivots on conflicting cultural perspectives - one embracing in revelry the tangible darkness of the night and the other racing in fear from beneath its shadow toward the light. The book provides a space in which culture, myth, and archetype can reconfigure their manifestations, allowing Goya, Houdini, Kali, Anais Nin, Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, Freud and the Mad Hatter and others to cast their selves throughout the moving circles in a shadowy cast of characters across time and continents. As the poems make their way through dream images, ideologies, and reinventions, the foremost question becomes that of the center and where it is, whether it can be reached, or if it even is. A resulting whirl propels the reader through goth-rock refrains and mantric prayers, incantations and phantom confessions, into an underground freefall exploring the textures of shadow and the consequences of light.

Poems in Intimacy with the Wind by Carla Schwartz encapsulate a nomadic life living on a solar electric-powered tiny houseboat on a lake. They touch on nature and the environment, and fuse the themes of love, family, death, and life throughout. Her poem Gum Surgery from the collection was selected for the Boston Mayor's 2017 Poetry Program, and later anthologized in the 2017 City of Notions, a Boston Poetry Anthology, edited by Danielle, Legros Georges.

At its core, my imaginary old man: poems is about desire. Desire for relationship. Desire for stability. Desire for authentic reality. The poems are spoken through an unnamed speaker who spins surrealistic verses that revolve around his enigmatic imaginary old man. The imaginary old man is nebulous, changing form with-and sometimes within-each poem. At times mythic, whittling wives from birch or carrying a moth-filled suitcase, other times extremely real and present, he is marked by flit and flight: he arrives, but not as often as he leaves. The poems' mirror the speaker's sense of absence and ambivalence through their aversion of clear end stops and punctuation that allows certain lines, phrases, and even the separate poems to run together and be read in multiple ways, creating a prismatic effect. The collection is also an exercise in form, the majority of poems playing in decasyllabics in addition to a group of prose pieces and modified haikus. The formal elements and language work to illustrate and illuminate a speaker who is simultaneously responding to and constructing a figure to fill its want, yet is only able to imagine the imaginary old man.

A haunting and harrowing collection of the inner life of a speaker, both as child and as adult, Down River contains, according to poet Mark Doty, "honest and startling poems that reveal themselves as acts of courage; meditations against 'dreaming darkness.'" This is a speaker who lives in the pain of childhood sexual abuse, the terror of mental illness, all within painful family secrets that haunt and "chronicle (s) the inner life of an adult," according to Doty. This "fractured self," writes poet Cynthia Huntington, allows the speaker's spirit to "affirm its own strength and integrity against what would break it." This "traumatic abuse," says poet Cynthia Hogue, creates a "haunting testimony of this powerful and necessary collection."

Set at a writers' residency in NE Wyoming, these finely crafted poems are candid and accessible. Rooted in decades of journal entries, they probe a painful divorce, love rediscovered and sustained for decades, the tension between youthful faith, doubt, and mature hope. They explore the power and limits of words. Roaming the Big Horn foothills, the poet sustains a journey of internal quest, seeking to reconcile past and present selves. In their cumulative effect, the poems build a narrative of discovery, friendship, hope, and delight in the natural world.

An unflinching collection of poems that breathe in our dark times. From cover to cover an unstoppable current of tumbling phrases take the reader on a trip down the rabbit hole and through contemporary history. Blade-edged yet somehow tender, the book reconciles the poetics and the political. With its visceral attention to beauty & brutality, the book brilliantly exploits the narrow seam between abstract & immediate, sublime & ordinary. Expect the book to haunt you.

In Sermon Series, her first full-length collection of poetry, writer Stephanie Harper focuses on moments that are explorations of the self and relationships with the exterior world, both known and unknown, through concrete and tangible expressions of language. Drawing direct inspiration from sermons and the worship experience, the writer has crafted a universally spiritual collection of poems that transcends religious tradition and instead focuses on the greater mysteries of living and experiencing the world around us, offering a new avenue for contemplative poetry.

In search of a new epistemology to address the fetus, poet Alina Stefanescu draws on her experience as an immigrant from a totalitarian country to probe the body's most ineffable borders. Her story-poems acknowledge the complexity of the female body- and the fertile terrain between its possibilities and vulnerabilities. An intimate geography of the relationships between female bodies and their babies, whether bourne, born, or unborn, these are the tongues kept silent in polite social circles. These are the women no one talks about. These are our mothers, sisters, wives, neighbors, and lovers. This is life.

Long Division considers the estrangement of two sisters, the pain oflongstanding trouble between them and the ambiguity of longing for repair. A version of Preparing for Family Gatherings was distributed by postcard to subscribers of Red-Flag Poetry Service in 2015. Despite childhood antagonism and now cold distance, the older sister's desire for that supposed guarantee of friend for life reemerges each time a friend mentions good times with one of their siblings. Why couldn't this be my sister and me? Could we learn to like each other? I'd let this go but now that I'm adult, I can't meet people who have known me since childhood. Yet, is friendship with one who I've been conflicting with since childhood where I should be pinning these hopes? Long Division is full of memories of the author's childhood with her sister, their brother, cousins and family in Colorado and reflects her difficulty not only with her sister, but also the passage of time in general. Could she have done something different? Was healing between her and her sister possible at one point but is no longer? Long Division sifts key memories for answers while knowing that none could be conclusive. But how else does one metabolize longing?

Small Fires, Little Flames is quiet, reflective and, I hope, true. The thirty poems are meant to be read in a single sitting and suggest a narrative not so much of events but of the development of spiritual principles.

Lois Levinson's poems combine her passion for birds with a whimsical view into what just might lie beyond the merely visible. Her insights into the workings of the natural world are made into poetry that explores our emotional connection with birds and our mutual habitat.

Secrets and treasures abound in Rita Coleman's poetry book, And Yet. A seamless interweaving of nature-creeks that talk, birds that bestow feathers of hope--and humanness-children who don't listen, a married couple that becomes the sea-offers a world of imagining. If paintings can step outside their frames, then trees can issue invitations to a party. If a Tarot card can come to life, a condor can guide you to an ancient, holy city. As readers meander through locations not of this world as well as places found on this earth, they will find their imaginations loosened from the stricture of logic and reality. Coleman's poetry invites the discovery of pathways once hidden in shadows. And Yet is both a single journey and a series of epiphanies. Light-filled "aha's" percolate on its pages. Coleman offers a new way of thinking that dips into ancient mysteries and soars beyond sight, that travels in theory and lives in the unseen, that wafts on a river and joins the spirit of the mountains. In this, as in her first book of poetry, Mystic Connections, Coleman creates free verse poems. She crafts them with the eye of a visual artist, conscious of how they will look on the page. (She is a photographer and a former graphic artist.) A signature technique in most of her poetry is the punch or question or revelation in the last few lines. This surprise is never anticipated. In the title poem, And Yet, Coleman writes of a possibility, of a beginning, maybe ours, maybe a long-lost civilization, maybe one to come. From the darkness emerge beings that have never existed before. While drums beat, they join together in villages. As thinking evolves, these people look to the sky, the earth, and the water to teach them virtues. Mothers and frightened children, the most vulnerable, find feathers of hope-scarlet, azure, iridescent. With renewed spirits, all find that "when forgiveness is served" it releases "knots of fury." In a cave in which paintings are highlighted by a flickering fire, everyone sits in a circle, the air fragrant and soothing. The question arises: "What does "and yet" mean?" Might it mean that despite pain, there is healing, and even thriving? Or could it be that no matter what one experiences, there is always the next moment? Granted, these are possibilities and speculations. Both may be correct. Or both may be incorrect. There is always the chance that only the heart of the poem knows the meaning and that anything else is only a subjective premise. Despite this unanswerable question, And Yet, leads the reader across a terrain that is new and unexpected. Coleman's poetry provokes thought as well as compassion. In "Where Air Grows," the reader is led past "tiny prisons of the mind" to the key of freedom. "This Fabric Called Grandmother" reveals the Ancient One who weaves grandmothers' spirits into being. "Ending, Beginning" speaks of the sweet release of death while "Just Shifted" addresses those left behind. The collection And Yet offers the best in free-verse poetry today. Rita Coleman's poems are evocative and fresh, insightful and light-filled. Read them as a guide. Read them as a journey. Explore a wide range of thought that unspools beyond speculation into wonder. Readers, prepare to be dazzled, moved, and soothed by And Yet.

In Jeanne Emmons's poetry collection, The Red Canoe, the canoe becomes a mode of both transportation and transformation and a metaphor for the mystery of the poetic imagination. The poems move between the point of view of the poet who owns the canoe and the consciousness of the canoe itself as it glides on the lake, bumps against the dock it is tied to, or lies on the bank beneath a blanket of snow. The canoe becomes an eye, ear, and mouth by which the world is perceived, taking in the seasons in succession and ruminating on its own limitations and dreams. Like the spider's web that forms in the canoe overnight, the canoe is a trembling net, ready to catch "the least sailing mayfly of possibility" that might become caught in its consciousness. The canoe craves recognition and attention, flirting like Marilyn Monroe, and smiling like a lipsticked mouth. But it also feels overexposed and wants to withdraw and retreat from the honking geese that surround it. Aware of how conspicuous it is within the muted colors of the natural landscape, it wishes not to be red, much as its poet owner is wary of being "read." The canoe is alone, yet it is half aware of an unseen force paddling it. It desires to be free, even as it knows that its very nature implies limitations. The canoe questions its urge to transmute reality, "does not know/ why everything has to be compared to be/ fully grasped," but is unable to stop itself from engaging in a "tangle of connections." The red canoe gradually emerges as a metaphor for consciousness itself and for not only the poetic imagination but also the human condition - aspiring, limited, and self-aware.