Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

These poems speak of the audacity and gracefulness of the human spirit. A sense of transcendence weaves a fabric of poetic forms in this vivid and relatable read.

Every intimate relationship can be summed up in a poem, a poignant signature that leaves a lasting impression. "Always honest, sometimes scathingly sad, (Tracy Ahrens') words are like a stone thrown through a window; breaking upon the page as sharp and crystal clear as tears," said L.B. Johnson, Award Winning Author of Small Town Roads, about Ahrens' poetry book, I Am. Ahrens' poems "take us on a spiritual journey, reminding us that each person is a piece of a puzzle wondering where we belong," noted Loren Logsdon, teacher, editor and short story writer.

These small stories in DS Levy's A Binary Heart depend on the "on-again, off-again" vagaries of daily life--often reflected in the simplest of moments--to sway (and sometimes change) the human heart.

Rural Score is a first collection of poems by Minnesota writer, Lina Belar. This is a writer who loves the places and the people she writes about. With Free Ticket, there is a strong emotional punch right at the beginning, a sense of loss and grief, that comes back in At the Cafe During WeFest. There are poems that hearken back to childhood and ground us. We are invited into the writer's world, traveling the back roads of northern Minnesota, listening to church bells in a rural town, and watching seagulls follow the plow, seemingly ordinary events with revealing angles exposed by the poet's eye. In the juxtaposition between Tornado and One Perfect Summer Evening, Belar suggests how art and community can help us get past devastation. Beginning to end, page by page, Rural Score reveals a poet who writes because she loves this place.

Praised by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as "a monumental achievement", The Selfless Bliss of The Body is award-winning novelist Gayle Brandeis' first full-length poetry collection. Poems from the book have been honored by the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Competition and the US Department of the Interior, which installed one of the poems at the Visitor Center in Joshua Tree National Park. These poems reach deeply into the body to reach beyond the body; Fresno Poet Laureate Lee Herrick writes "These tender and fierce poems are breathtaking gifts from a writer whose love for the world knows no bounds."

"Becoming Trans-Parent, One Family's Journey of Gender Transition", a collection of poems by Annette Langlois Grunseth, shares the parental experience of an adult child transitioning from son to daughter. Through understandable poetry, information is woven around one family's story to provide awareness about the journey of gender identity. Narrative poems explain changing avatars, using bathrooms, selecting clothing, grieving, passing as a woman, job discrimination, unique health issues, what happens to marriage and family, along with the joy that comes from seeing a child transition into living an authentic life.

Mary Strong Jackson's From Other Tongues gathers words from other languages considered untranslatable into English. These words title the poems. Inspiration from the definition of these titles result in a fine collection of poems to please the English-speaking ear and palate. These poems inform word-lovers, entice dreamers, and spark thinkers to wonder the shades and distinctions of other languages while providing pleasure by Jackson's fresh, earthy, and readable work. Her sculpted images range from sensual scenes of two gods moving the mouths of mortals to an old woman worrying the doorway shiny as she continually checks to see if anyone is coming. The poem titles come from 13 different languages. The definition of the Indonesian word, "Jayus" is a joke so poorly told one cannot help but laugh. In this poem, Jackson writes, "one last orange blossom beer/and the stoop's last step/twists your ankle/on what's supposed to be the landing". The word, "Tingo" from the Pascucense (Eastern Indonesian) language spoken on Easter Island means to gradually steal all your neighbor's belongings by borrowing and not returning. From the poem, "Tingo", "he asks for scissors/I fold my hair into his hands/he requests a washcloth/I give my morning scent". Santa Fe Poet Laureate Emerita, Joan Logghe, writes the following, "Just as her book, The Never-Ending Poem, brings the freshest approaches to a body of work, From Other Tongues is equally original and delightful. Mary Strong Jackson's language and imagination invite me into a mind well-traveled and I am an unabashed admirer. I want to thank her for writing such a book, it will be coming on and off my shelf with frequency.

In Scar Tissue, historical poet Eve Rifkah turns from recounting marginalized voices of the past to delving into her personal heritage by telling the story of the tortured life of her aunt. Cora spent the first seven years of her life in foster care while her mother was in a state hospital for the mentally ill. Foster care turned out to be the happiest time of her life, even though she was badly scarred when scalded with hot water. The cruelty of the burn nurses gave rise to a dream of becoming a nurse to treat others with respect and kindness. When Cora's father remarried, her childhood as a real-life Cinderella began. Forced to do chores her stepsisters escaped, she was also closely observed for signs of her birth-mother's possible insanity. Her mantra became, "I'm not crazy, not crazy". Cora's realization of her dream to become a nurse and her work for a year in the new nation of Israel were followed by an unhappy marriage and loss of two of five children. When her youngest child became an Orthodox Jew, she returned to the religion of her childhood and learned anew how to manage a kosher lifestyle. Cora's strength lay in her ability to deal with difficult times and still to know joy in the simplest of things. Cora's niece tells her story in a bleak yet simple language creating empathy for the main character. We root for Cora to succeed against all odds.

The poetry collection, Prisms, Particles, and Refractions, includes, "The Blue of Swimming Pools" the Franklin-Christoph 2010 Poetry Contest Award Winning pantoum; and "We Select" which placed in the Thirteenth Annual Ultra-Short Competition, University of Maine at Machias, 2016. The fourth collection is by Carol Smallwood, a multiple Pushcart nominee. Her Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching is on Poets & Writers Magazine List of Best Books for Writers. The foreword is by Lisa Zaran, poet, founder, and editor of Contemporary American Voices. Light has been studied since ancient times to contemporary quantum mechanics-we know that nothing travels faster. It is something we take for granted but once we begin to try and understand light, find it has many mysteries yet hidden. Prisms, Particles, and Refractions is a collection of free verse and formal poems aimed at capturing some of the aspects of light-light that our eyes detect and light also as metaphor. Most of the poems are serious but some have a pinch of humor found to help perspective. The seventy-three poems are divided into: Prelude; Prisms; Particles; Refractions; Epilogue.

Michelle Bonczek Evory takes us on an expedition into the lives of Meriwether Lewis and Sacagawea, as she explores what it means to live as an explorer of life, love, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Layered within these poems inspired by history are poems that reflect on and narrate the poet's own journeys through love and her own explorations of the western states. These poems delight in the grandeur of wilderness, and the grandeur of the heart reminding us how brave all of us are-and must be-in our own quests for happiness.

Landscape of The Wait is a poetic response to the trauma and uncertainty of a teenager's car crash and year-long coma. The young man's aunt and a poet, Jami Macarty, offers poems to try to make sense of crisis and liminal spaces between life and death, consciousness and coma, light and darkness, sameness and change. Her words enact the energies of living in the extended limbo that lurk around every corner for every auto driver and passenger and family member.

Cristina Trapani-Scott's collection of poems The Persistence of a Bathing Suit explores the moments that fill the space between surviving a breast cancer diagnosis and accepting the inevitability of change and uncertainty. The poems move through that space by reflecting on quiet moments with family, on the physical changes that occur in that space, and finally the changed perspective on mortality.