Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

Alphalexia! A romp through the alphabet like you never imagined. Each poem is a meditation on a letter, all 26 of them! This book digs words out of the dark and brings them to light in a playful, even joyous fashion, for the mere pleasure of sound, and the taste of words on the tongue. Barbra Nightingale's latest collection of poems is truly a unique exploration of what language can and will do!

Reposed is a book of poetry concerned with keeping the memory and history of a family alive when the photographic record of it has been lost. Coming of age in the Boomer years of the 1950s and 60s, the author, our tomboy narrator, introduces us to her military family with southern roots. It includes a drunken aunt, a cookie salesmen, a malicious nun, a mother who hates her teeth, and a cousin booked and fingerprinted for keeping a pig within city limits. Their lives aren't just humorous however. Alcoholism snakes through this family, affecting and damaging each generation. Not everyone survives it. Many stories were undoubtedly lost along with the family photos that were sold at an estate sale by the author's father. Fortunately, in these pages, a few are rescued and find new life.

The Fires's Edge by Nancy Richardson is a chapbook that contains poems about the economic hardships resulting from de-industrialization in the rust-belt of Ohio, the social upheaval, and the efforts to alter the results of dislocation through campaigns and protest. Interlaced with social justice poems are remembrances of the people and places the author knew during that time. The book is dedicated to the authors sister, Galen Keller Lewis, researcher for the Kent State Trial. The book begins with a poem, Randomness, that describes the shooting of student Sandra Scheuer who was walking to class and was shot from 400 feet away wearing a red shirt her Mother had sent her for her birthday. Other poems on this subject include a description of the fear involved in attending a Jefferson Airplane concert after the shootings and the treatment of students during the civil trial. The book's poems move to describe the door to door campaigning that was designed to elect a President who believed in democratic principals in 2004. The poems are particularly timely when one considers the recent campaigns in Ohio which have reflected the same issues that were resonant through the 1970s 80s and 90s. But the book also delivers striking descriptions and elegies of the people close to the author in the decades from the 1970s to the present. These evolve into a series of poems at the end of the book that are philosophical in nature. The book avoids the strident language that is often present in political poetry and in the choice of images and language underlines what we have lost and what we may hold dear to us in the on-going attempt to forge a life of conscience.

Blisters, thorns, insect bites and sunburn are almost discernible in the lines of poetry that relate a life of engagement with the land and water of coastal Savannah. Ann Sheils, and many generations of her family, have lived a life informed by the perennial garden that is the world. Ann was given her first boat and motor at 12, and before that learned camellia grafting from her grandfather-activities that transformed her appreciation of both the real world and the insubstantial one that underlies it, and that taught the need for a "compromised flowering."

Mullin updates the sonnet's content with musings on "quotidian" events - the evening news, shopping for clothes, a baseball pitcher, a Derby winner -- while also showcasing a deep appreciation of the natural world. She uses the traditional fourteen lines and a variety of rhyme schemes to explore the sonnet form itself.

On their honeymoon, two women journey to Oregon and encounter the deeper, painful springs of the state's history while learning from the land and water how to live, and love, in new ways. Oregon is thought to have been a Native American word for "beautiful waters." In this volume of poetry with the same name, Beautiful Waters, the landscapes of nation and state are seen through the eyes of a woman in love. On her honeymoon in Oregon with her new wife, the poet takes readers with her on a journey through the element of water as a representation of our heart's deepest natural powers: vulnerability, intimacy, and renewal. The seven poems with titles like "Clouds," "Falls," and "Springs," move beneath the obvious, personal streams into the deeper, underground histories of Westward Expansion, Native American removal, industrialization and commercialization, and environmental destruction. And yet throughout, there are rainbows, blends of color and light and water, leading us to hope for something greater. Beautiful Waters, in the end, shows what might spring from facing these histories: an understanding of our shared connection to the land with its promise of healing our wounds as we learn to live, and love, in new ways.

Going's narrative poetry immerses the reader into the world of the Los Angeles commute and shares the story of a fifty-year-old commuter who stops the commute, joins park life, and experiences jazz, the landscape, and his parents' deaths. During the summer of 2010, in other words, while commuting, Going's narrator re-experiences writing poetry and recalling past days of listening to jazz and blues, and bebop players. Then, he begins to stop regularly at a large Los Angeles park and interrupts his commuting with writing more poetry. Unwittingly, at first, he joins park life and feels its tension with commuter life. Los Angeles commuters typically travel one-to-a-car and seem to believe they're always going to places even when stuck in traffic jams! But, park visitors usually come with a group and connect more intimately to each other in the park. So, as Going's narrator lives in this conflicted world, he also displaces himself into recollections of growing up in the Midwest, and he comes to terms with the death of both his parents that summer. In short, the tensions between the need to stay in one place and never totally being in one place makes Going into a personal story with vivid pictures of Los Angeles life in the commute and at a park.