Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

Born-Child is a memoir in poetry which focuses on the dual status of the adopted child. Adopted children live in two worlds even in a successful adoption. There are always the biological parents and the adoptive parents which in many cases are not at odds. But for the child, especially the child adopted past infancy, there can be a struggle for identity.This book of poems reveals the phases and emotions of that journey. How to become a person with two sets of parents, how to reconcile divided loyalties, and ultimately how to live as a whole person are here illuminated in thirty-three poems. And, in the end, the author arrives at reconciliation and is able to "touch earth" just as the last poem describes.

Winner of the 2016 New Women's Voices Series Prize

Strange Roof is a bold collection that shines a light on women as immigrants, emigrants, mothers, daughters, wives and artists. The poems are fresh; searingly honest, sharp, poignant and accessible.

This Invisible Beauty is a series of poems about the life of writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Rawlings moved to the hamlet of Cross Creek, Florida, in 1928. She and her husband bought a farmhouse in the middle of a seventy-four-acre citrus orchard. They planned to simplify their lives, earning an income from the sale of citrus, while Marjorie continued her writing career. She fell in love with the pine scrub country and with the "Crackers" who inhabited it. At Cross Creek she found her voice. The years between her arrival and the publication of The Yearling in 1938 were some of the happiest and most productive of her life.

In her first poetry collection, a chapbook about motherhood and identity, L.J. Sysko investigates the paradox presented by love. Accountability masquerades as confinement, hope wears an anxious mask, and attachment feels like a heavy yoke. Beginning with a new volcanic island hissing to hardness in the distance, Battledore sails from one exotically familiar locale to the next. With "you" at the helm, the poems chart interior territory, mapping the cracks formed by seismic identity shifts like giving birth, encountering post-partum depression, and maintaining a self. At times lighthearted and humorous, Battledore pokes fun at its own predicament. Using references as diverse as Charles Darwin and Candies heels or Elizabeth Bishop and Preparation H, Sysko presents an imagination circumnavigating the wild freedom within. Battledore's poems have been published in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, and Amazon's Day One.

The poems in "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" discover a universe in a perennial flower garden. A reporter and a novelist, Robert Knox's poems are as immediate as today and as universal as the weather. The characters in these poems are May and September, roses, asters, morning glory, anemone, honey bees, squirrels and hummingbirds. The poems followed a garden lover's decision to dig up all the grass at his Boston area home and plant flowers, both perennials and annuals, ground covers, shrubs, a small tree or two, berry bushes, and vegetables. To be an amateur means to do something not for money, but for love. A few summers later the garden blossomed, and the poems grew from the voices heard while tending the plants, pulling weeds, trimming old growth, planting anew. While Knox is an amateur gardener, he's a professional writer, with a thousand bylines in the Boston Globe and other new newspapers and periodicals, writing news, features, op-eds, book reviews, and arts and entertainment columns. His fiction and creative nonfiction stories have appeared in various literary periodicals. He is a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, where his own poems appear every month, and his novel on the Massachusetts roots of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, "Suosso's Lane," has won praise from readers and reviewers. When the gardener goes indoors, he remembers history: a father's wartime brush with death, family crises, his own slow dance with youthful dreams. In the greater world beyond the garden preschoolers dash across busy roads, adult children have childlike birthdays, and Syrian refugees beg on the streets of Beirut. The poems in "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" also visit idyllic Greek islands, take a journey along the Sacred Way to ancient Delphi, discover an old wooden wall that survived a decade and a half of ruinous civil war and the furious reconstruction of Lebanon's capital city; and reflect on winter nights filled with silent buses and Chinese spices, while the stars go on telling stories of their own. As his lines saluting an urban balcony garden (in "The Leaf Washers") proclaim, we celebrate our own lives when we cherish the blossoms, branches, and leaves in a garden: "They mediate the base of things, the fundamentals,/ Molecules, waves, atoms, energy-matter - the rain in Piccadilly,/ The fountains of Beirut, the voices of the stars."

With two Pushcart Prize Nominated poems included ("How to Fold an Origami Girl" and "Consuming the Wick"), this short but powerful collection leaves its mark. The poems crease and bend at the center of love and loss much like the way a piece of paper is folded over and again to become a crane, a moon, or a lamp. In the process, the reader is invited along, not just as witness, but participant, and leaves changed.

Novice is a collection of prose poems that all revolve around the theme of the young person making sense of and embarking on the adult world. It is also a collection about finding one's own vocation and purpose in life. The poems range from getting drunk for the first time to seeing a homeless person for the first time to witnessing a man sliced in half in an elevator accident to reading my poems out loud for the first time to an audience and being thrilled by the experience.

Within the first lines of What Binds Us, both the frailty and necessity of human connection is exposed. Unspoken pains lie at the heart of a family's dynamic. Cheryl Wilder pushes beyond her family's silence in order to understand the point where relationships break down. We first see this demonstrated by the strained relationship between her mother and grandmother. These lessons aren't easily learned. After a failed marriage and still in her twenties, it's in caring for her son where Wilder begins to see the intertwining roles of mother, daughter, wife, and individual woman. Here, Wilder begins to build her own family foundation. When she finds new love, he's able to add support and structure to what she has already built for her and her son. What Binds Us is about family and how we're bound to people, place, and ultimately ourselves.

Three children journey toward self-understanding and forgiveness in Juniata County, a chapbook collection of 18 poems that spans ninety years; World War II and the post-war era is a backdrop for the experiences many of the losses common to us all, throughout the collection; the setting, Juniata, Pennsylvaia, is an area rich in heritage with its Altoona railroad yards, back alleyways, summer porches, Valley of the Sesquehanna, Little Juniata River, Lakemont Amusement Park, and the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, which all weave through and around their childhood experiences.

BLACK DOG HAPPY: A BOOK FOR THE ANIMAL IN ALL OF US Black Dog Happy contains poems celebrating plants, animals and their protectors as well as protesting against those who would do violence to them. Because I grew up in Parma, Ohio, and went to school in Cleveland, my first encounter with wild animals was predictably, the Cleveland Zoo. Several Dog poems recall Zoo days with my mother, mostly joyful, but not without ambivalence about the institution of the Zoo. A Parma poem describes suburban boys defying death while climbing billboards in Parma; a Cleveland poem recalls days at old Euclid Beach amusement park with my father, as close to adventure as typical suburban children get. Other verses pay homage to environmental protectors inspired by walking tours through Cherokee country and tribal peoples who defeated Custer at Greasy Grass (Little-Big Horn). Similarly, "The Day Romero Died," pays tribute to a protector from South of the Border. Sequenced poems conflate categories of human and non-human: "Life in Captivity: Dolphins" is followed by "Life in Captivity: Husband and Wife." For these reasons, I confidently claim that this is a book for the animal in all of us.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has traveled around the world twice, both for six-month sabbaticals while teaching English. In 2000 she and her husband, Ben, homeschooled their children, Abby and David, as they traveled across the Deep South of the United States to San Francisco and then off to New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, South Africa, Egypt, Scotland, and Italy. This experience launched a love of travel-Ben and Sarah have taken students on service and adventure trips to Cambodia, Vietnam, India, South Africa, Rwanda, and New Orleans. In 2014, Sarah and Ben, again took off for six months, adding Japan, China, Laos, and Rwanda, and returning to both India and South Africa. Notes From a Nomad unveils the power of travel by unearthing empathy so necessary in today's world. These poems pull us into discovering beauty and understanding tragedy by fully seeing the people and places on this Earth.