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A finalist in Finishing Line Press's 2017 NEW WOMEN'S VOICES CHAPBOOKCOMPETITION, Slow Blooming Gratitudes is Vermont poet Sarah W. Bartlett's secondchapbook. Her poems invite readers into moments of transformation, healing and presence."These are no ordinary poems of love, loss, letting go, courage, and universality," writesCynthia Brackett-Vincent, publisher and editor of the Aurorean poetry journal. "Rather… they are extraordinary poems ... masterfully crafted … extending the hand of welcometo each reader."Ellaraine Lockie, award-winning poet, nonfiction author, contest judge, and educator saysthe language of this collection "seeps into the reader like a slow, soft massage" in itscapacity "to offer solace and acceptance in times of adversity."Sarah's poetry and prose appear in Adanna, the Aurorean, Minerva Rising, PoemMemoirStory,Mom Egg Review, Ars Medica; and highly-acclaimed anthologies, including the award-winningWomen on Poetry (McFarland & Co. Inc., 2012). Her first poetry chapbook was Into the GreatBlue: Meditations of Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2011).In 2010, she founded writing inside VT, a weekly writing group inside Vermont's sole women'sprison to encourage personal and social change within a supportive community. Now in itseighth year, the program hosts an active blog (www.writinginsideVT.com) and continues to holdreadings and book talks based on the 2013 publication of HEAR ME, SEE ME:INCARCERATED WOMEN WRITE (Orbis Books). Sarah co-edited this anthology of writingand art by 60 early program participants, and has published a number of pieces as well asdelivered two keynote speeches about the work.Sarah was greatly influenced by her father, a world-class chemist devoted to making the world abetter place. From him she learned the value of community and a love of words at play. Sarahspent the first 25 years of her professional life using language in service to planning, marketingand public relations for non profit organizations. Sarah's current work as change agent and poetdraws on the full range of her experience and prior training, including a doctorate in healtheducation from Harvard and certification as a mediator. Language remains the medium for herlife work creating communities that support individual transformation and healing throughwriting, as well as her own creative writing. Like the hummingbird who has taught her to seedeep into the heart of things, she seeks to awaken the soul to presence.Her reflections on both external and interior worlds draw from her life and homes in the Vermontmountains and Massachusetts shore, where she lives with her husband and pets.

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.

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.

Winner of the 2016 New Women's Voices Series Prize

This collection could be called The Lives of Girls and Women if Alice Munro hadn't already taken the title. In funny, lyrical, poignant poems and prose poems, Herman conjures everyone from lonely teenage girls listening to records in their bedrooms to her own Depression-era seamstress mother to Betty Boop to the oldest daughter of the old woman who lives in a shoe.

New York City native Dina Paulson-McEwen's debut poetry collection, Parts of love, (Finishing Line Press, 2018) was a 2017 finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Parts of love explores interstices in loving, delving into themes of relationships, living, the body, and desire, and includes prose and lyric poems. "Paulson-McEwen plays with paradox, excavating moments of hope amongst the seeming ruins, "that signal you sent - / a dagger of fire / amongst all the black - / will bring me home /". These poems are not merely to be read, but to be dissolved into with a whole and vulnerable spirit," writes author Robin Richardson. Parts of love speaks to (an) experience of love from/within a woman's body. Author Marthe Reed writes, "Simultaneously site of desire, sexual fulfillment, ritual, and reproduction, the girl body [in Parts of love] is figured also as site of disobedience, investigation, erasure, trauma of the medicalized self. Paulson-McEwen's response? Go into dream, into ritual, into love-making and self-love, resistance writ as love-cum-beloved...Tantric, celebratory, bewitching, Parts of love takes l-o-v-e as a new divine/beloved, site and center of worship, ecstatically evoking love's manifold quotidian forms against any and all erasures."

Traversing the sparse and sometimes rugged territory from Stevensville, Montana to the Flathead Indian Reservation, Bitterroot poignantly witnesses the complex intersections of Native and non-Native culture in Montana. A testament to the spirit of the land and those shaped by it, this collection reveals the ways in which the West remains both fraught with tension and modeled by beauty. Narrated by a young teacher with unexpected ties to the children in her classroom, each poem unfolds another layer of mountain life- from hauling wood and making fire to navigating a blizzard and grieving the loss of a student. Page by page, life presses closely against that which is raw and wild, lending individual moments a sense of urgency: "What I remember/ from Ovando, though, is stars. Stars and ice/ and the shock of our short inward breath." Attentive to a long tradition of tough Montana poets, Jessica Jones pays homage to giants such as Richard Hugo and James Welch while befriending contemporary writers like Jennifer Finley Greene and Robert Lee. A runner-up with Open Country Press and honorable mention with Cutbank at University of Montana, Bitterroot is essential for any avid reader of Western literature.

The poems in Frost Flowers by Winifred Hughes plunge, open-eyed and open-hearted, into the natural world-its seasonal rhythms and impenetrable mysteries, its vanishings, its incorrigible quality of being alive. They seek to chronicle the encounter between the non-human and the all-too-human, the passion and longing of our species as we relate to our natural environment, both apart from it and a part of it. Like the swallows and tanagers and foxes, like the box elder and frostweed, we are transitory creatures living in vivid moments. These poems are propelled by curiosity, precise observation, and a sense of wonder; they are a searching, a probing into the secrets at the heart of natural processes, which are the fundamental processes of life and death. The natural world appears under all its contradictory aspects-sharp stones in a streambed, hatchlings clinging to their precarious nest, wildflowers that are both beautiful and poisonous, the exuberance and overflowing life of a flock of blackbirds. In the midst of such fullness and blossoming, there is always the possibility of frost, whether nipping early buds or being transformed into late-blooming flowers made of ice. Like our fellow species, from hardwood trees growing slowly over centuries to small passerines with speeded-up metabolisms, we are subject to the passage of time; before we can quite grasp it, our moment is gone. Throughout, we are inextricably bound up in our natural context, in the wild places and wildlife that are increasingly threatened by human activity.

In Two Tongues, Lana Issam Ghannam writes about her experiences growing up as a first-generation Palestinian-American in post-9/11 America. She creates small scenes from big perspectives in each poem as she navigates her two cultures from adolescence to adulthood. She moves in and out of family duty, religion, culture, gender expectations, patriotism, and competing languages in the search for her truest identity. These poems represent her growth, stand for her pride, and strive for the absolute strength known by so many immigrated families-"I grow beneath the ground / in this America of coloring seas. / …I am of this earth, this flame / …I own the roots of this land."