Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

Tiny Little Beauty is a collection of short poems inspired by nature and the students at the rural community college where Bobbi Buchanan taught academic writing for five years. The poems are all free verse and revolve around themes of guilt, depression, abandonment, addiction, abuse, death, recovery, and the healing power of nature.

Across An Aqueous Moon: Travels in Autism explores parenting a child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a condition that affects 1 in 55 children in the United States. In this moving and inspirational debut, Cynthia J. Patton-single mother, attorney, autism advocate, and founder of the nonprofit organization Autism A to Z-faces adoption, autism, abandonment, divorce, and dating. It's a story in poems that examines upended dreams, discarded expectations, and unforeseen joys as it reveals the power of human resilience. The spare, elegant poems illuminate the complex, hidden world of autism where "hope blooms amidst the grass of doubt" and shadows of grief give way to the light of a mother's fierce, shining love.

To need for a home, whether it is a country, a house, a good partner, or in whatever manifestation, is fundamental. The poems in Step by Careful Step explore homesickness for place and time, the desire to be a part of something, the aftermath of war.

Linda Golden has crafted a book that captures the nuances of her life's journey. She considers herself a student of the human condition, sculpted by her training as a Psychoanalyst as well as her studies of spiritual traditions. She focuses her attention on the interplay, in poetic form, of the pull between psychological forces and longings of the spirit. Her insights and observations blended with honesty and humor make for an inviting read.

We Are Beautiful Like Snowflakes is 21 poems that takes the reader on a journey through time revisiting events from the 1940's to the present year of 2016 highlighting family, class, race, adolescence, faith and the importance of empathy when looking at the lives of those less fortunate then ourselves.

Twenty-one is a cycle of brief poems written in the year following the death of the author's daughter.

In the poetry chapbook, The Fire Eater and the Bearded Lady, the reader is invited into the world of an old-time circus/sideshow. Each poem is in the persona and voice of various circus performers, both human and animal, employees, and spectators-who are also complicit in the acts they see. From roustabout to elephant, lion tamer to clown, the circus exposes us all.

Light in Unopened Windows by Priscilla Turner Spada is a collection of poems, "with an ear tuned to both formal poetry and free verse," * that opens windows to the past. Poems about a family's history--a father killed in WW II, a widowed mother living into her 100th year--express the poet/daughter's response to these and other losses. The poems "are at once elegies and celebrations, a tribute to feelings that endure and outlast the absences left behind".****Priscilla is a poet/artist living in Newburyport, MA.The publisher, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY, can be reached at www.finishinglinepress.com. *Mimi White**Rhina P. Espallat

Katherine Nelson-Born's premiere chapbook, When Mockingbirds Sing, published by Finishing Line Press, is grounded in her New Orleans roots, but her poems soar into unexpected places. When Mockingbirds Sing takes flight out of the ruins of Katrina and Palmyra and celebrates the imagination's triumph over personal as well as global tragedies. Katherine's poetry "sets free from earth's orbit" the ordinary and the extraordinary in words "so clean, so twisted" that you can't help but enjoy her warp-speed wit shooting from the hip while joining her rocket-fueled ride as "cosmic debris/firing across the universe."In poems that "sing like the Mockingbird" from a "throaty darkness" illuminating a "new dark edged with sparks," Katherine's wordplay makes us "backwards/fly" and rise like "a snowy egret" into the sun, "wings ablaze," exploding above the ruins we create into something "newer than the morning of a day not yet born." Katherine's words "fall/like dogwood petals flowering the ashen earth" and dare us to ask ourselves if art is "worth a life." Read her poems and "bear witness," and if you "feel lost," remember, "the fossils point the way." In these pages, enjoy award-winning poems that have appeared in AlaLit.com, Alyss, Ellipsis, Emerald Coast Review, Excelsior ReView, GSU Review, Maple Leaf Rag and Penumbra

In Origin, Jennifer Hurley gathers together stories that illustrate how family, memories, and experiences shape who we are, recollections that come to life with detailed, unique imagery. The intimate narrative voice throughout encourages readers to connect in both personal and universal ways. The poet's ability to suggest meaning in even the smallest of moments prompts an intuitive, reflective reading experience.

This collection, the author's first, takes slippages in language as a starting point to explore gaps within the self, between the self and the world of others and everyday objects, as well as faultlines within the body politic. The encounter with a foreign tongue becomes an occasion for both loss of self and opening into otherness; the attempt to gain a hold on things by writing them down proves ominously fleeting. At turns playful and sober, French Lessons does not bring us Paris cityscapes or villages in Provence, but rather meditates on the lingering power of the foreign to challenge and transform the familiar.

The Paper Girl is a poetry chapbook that details the coming of age story of a daughter growing up in a Baptist fundamentalist home in New Jersey. The girl is a working class paper girl who is sometimes invited into the private world of her privileged neighbor's lives where she tries to make sense of what family means. She is good at observing, processing, and reflecting upon the loneliness, kindness, and freedom of others around her. But to her own horror, she also internalizes their impressions about the port wine stain birthmark on her face, and dizzy from the orthodoxy of her mother's rules and religion, she struggles to find a language to narrate her own story.

Voices from the First Gilded Age takes us back and forth across the Atlantic, from London to New York to Paris, through the epistolary conversations of husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, children and their parents. These poems reflect the abiding concerns of their time-from the 1890s to the First World War-as well as our own, with subjects that range from finding a suitable match for an eligible daughter and keeping the servants in line to politics, miscarriage, and the ravages of war. The Gilded Age in American and European history was a time of unprecedented economic growth and technological advance that created a widening rift between the newly wealthy and those toiling in mines, mills, and factories to support them. A time when the daughters of an upstart American aristocracy were herded by ambitious parents into the social whirl of London to be paired with scions of a staid Victorian English nobility. A time of cities transformed by skyscrapers and seas traversed by great ocean liners that seemed like floating cities to their first class passengers, who rarely encountered the immigrant families consigned to the lower decks. Fans of "Downton Abbey" and the novels of Edith Wharton may feel a kinship with many of the "voices" in these poems full of observations both witty ("There's nothing quite so/ instructive as scorn blazing from the green eyes/ of a matriarch whose soul has long been given/ over to the running of this house") and terse ("One's pedigree will out"). This unusual first collection shows Ed Granger to be part historian, part eavesdropper, and pure poet.

In Hard Letters and Folded Wings, the author writes about themes common to women's lives. Many of the poems in this collection have been used by therapists in Florida and New York as a resource for their clients. Four of the poems have been finalists for the Emily Dickinson Award, The Frank O'Hara Award, the Richard Eberhart Poetry Award, and the Michael Egan Annual Poetry Contest.

A journey from birth to adulthood focusing on a speaker's relationship with his mother, other women, and fears of losing all of them in a world inevitably filled with death.

Although the title, Gravel Road Ahead, hints at what's in store, readers may not be prepared for the heart-wrenching journey ahead. When poet Sue Fagalde Lick and her husband Fred left their careers in Silicon Valley for a new home on the Oregon Coast, they thought all their dreams were coming true. Then Fred, a former city administrator and part-time tax preparer, started forgetting things. In moving poems that range from darkly humorous to heart-breaking, Sue is unflinchingly honest in her chronicling of both the bitter and the sweet moments as she accompanies her husband of 25 years down the circuitous path of Alzheimer's disease. For those traveling this road with a loved one, Lick's a guide to be trusted, offering a lifeline of patience and forbearance gleaned from their journey. But there's plenty of insight here for any couple growing older together-and a reminder of just what we sign on for when we repeat "I do."

Michael Lee Bross's debut poetry chapbook, "Meditations on an Empty Stomach", winner of the 2015 "Arts by the People Chapbook Award", follows the philosophical wanderings of a new father taking his first steps into parenthood. His poetic journey leading him through crisis of faith, sexuality, and responsibility as he struggles to come to grips with his new role and his now outdated and abruptly shattered perspectives on life, death, existence, hunger, and his ability to guide a newborn life through a world he himself barely understands. This book challenges the patriarchal norms through at times serious, and other times whimsical poetic fancies, all while exploring the world through the imagine lens of his infant daughter.