Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

Peter Caccavari's first book of poetry is a testament to resisting despair, how to live with, how to come to love, loss of life, the losses of the body. In these poems there is comfort in the everyday and, more important, in the natural world where there are always reminders, always remainders, of what has almost-but not quite-disappeared. Caccavari's primary trope for this interplay of appearance and disappearance is the voice and the nonvoice: "the unvoiced is voiced/ and heralds come to us/ from the most unlikely places." Attending to the details demands a sensibility seasoned by the hard facts of living since "...love is stern/ As death, that death whispers love's calumny." Thus, loss is a kind of gain, a difficult lesson to accept until "we have the strength to be/ That weak." A Minor Loss of Fidelity is a gesture toward, an attempt at, restoration and these poems trace that process with clear-headed, open-eyed, trepidation and wonder.-Tyrone WilliamsSweet and elegant, wry and inquisitive, the poems of Peter Caccavari prove formally rigorous and informally dazzling. Whether writing about the cosmos or the supermarket, COVID-19 or Jupiter, Caccavari offers us solace lined with skepticism-or maybe skepticism lined with solace?-our lives together in this earth-bound moment his deepest subject. In a crown of sonnets, terza rima, a villanelle, and buckets full of free verse, Minor Loss of Fidelity makes us all better, not a curative but a reckoning.-Alan Michael Parker

In dialogue with his Modernist forebears-Cummings and Williams, in particular-Muldowney's carefully observed poems attend to the textures of language, while inviting us to see the world in its particularity through the eyes of the child-as-naturalist, the man-as-son, as spouse, and as father.-Alba Newmann Holmes, Assistant Professor of English and Interim Director of the Writing Associates Program at Swarthmore CollegeWeeks after reading "Confessions," a long, fragmented poem in which a man on the street approaches the narrator, begging forgiveness for murder, I am still haunted by his pleadings: " 'What do I do? Tell me . . . How am I forgiven hombre de Dios? Tell me!' / I prop him up. 'Save me hombre de Dios!' He tugs my hand ... Begs." Muldowney's halting, stumbling lines that weave in footnoted Spanish and English give even more pain to the scene: discomfort in being approached, the horror of the crimes committed, the uselessness of one man forgiving another for such violence. All the poems in Q-Drive are so crafted: Starting with pieces that evoke a country childhood, moving into a world-traveled adult, Micah Muldowney's poems are rich in image and soaked in the varying languages of time and place. The characters in the narrative pieces are true and vibrant, lingering with you.-Scott Russel Morris, Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Utah Asia Campus

In this stunning volume, Janlori Goldman undertakes a searching expedition, on which some world histories are visited, and old traumas brought home and repossessed. The center of this journey is a searing "crown of sonnets" that enlarges the literature of that demanding form. Poem by poem, even as we watch, Goldman transmutes the raw nectar of living into the honey of a deeply moving art.-Suzanne R. Hoover, PhD, Literary Scholar and Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Writing ProgramIn the poems of My Antarctica, Janlori Goldman is on the move, engaged in exploring the terms of the heroic quest as she ranges over longitudes and latitudes of the imagination, from fraught interior landscapes of childhood to a rediscovered and riskily renovated home place and the far pole of peril and inner discovery. The poet embodies her own exploration, seeking to "chart my own geography,/how the body rises up/and away from itself." She defines her destination as a journey: "I can split, be my own/fork in the road, lichen/growing over its gash,/or be the border wall/that guides my hand." These poems lead us to lay claim to our own hearts.-David Groff, author of Clay

The poems in Autumn Has The Most Important Job shows the intimacy that can be witnessed through the seasons. It is one that helps us to travel along the string of life: memories and daydreams, moving from love to loss, being consumed by everlasting grief, relishing in the touch of loved ones, and being lovingly stroked by the hope only the dark can bring. Drawing on lived experiences and vivid daydreams, this collection of poems shows the seemingly randomness of raw emotions as they work together to create a picture of the complexity of life.

Framed by the claustrophobic experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, these poems share a concern with the fragility of the earth and our bodies on the earth, as well as the webs we weave through virtual means of connection. Michael draws on Biblical and mythological allusions as well as personal anecdotes, in both formal and free verse, to chart the porous boundaries of our current world and to create a space for mutual dwelling, with all the risks entailed in that cohabitation.

Between the Hours is a collection of poems, some in prose form, that meditate on the paradoxical nature of time. Using spare language to evoke "a mystery inside the clear day," each poem reveals a glimpse of a liminal space unseen and most often overlooked when we are focused on daily concerns. Beginning with "Cloud 0," the collection traces through lost hours, darkness, wind, sleep, snow to gather a sense of what passes through. The word "clear" appears many times in this chapbook that opens "a hand in a dream/that doesn't let go." The imagery, often from the natural world, conjures memories and dreams as well as history, science, philosophy and spirituality transforming the moment into one of eternity.

Altar of the Imagination is a work of love and loss. Each poem is a witness attempting to make order out of the three generations of women surviving an immigrant history sick with guilt and shame. When the chaos cleared and the last of the lineage is born into and falls in abundant love early in life, there is now confusion of choice: how does she live a satisfied life?As an Aztec dancer, offering prayer to Coatlicue, Coyolxauhqui, and Tonantzin in every dance, each poem asks permission to honor the endurance of her family. Each poem is a plea, teach her how to do this: live. To live how the other women who came before her could not: free.

Peter Krass is taking us, his readers, on quite a trip (and given the Sixties reference, the word's two-at least-meanings pertain) in these poems. Time is sandwiched, hijacked and serenaded ("To travel like this is to fly, / free and high, like a kettle of kites,") between youth and older age. The poet, side-kicking along with Bruce Springsteen and his desire "to change the world / with nothing more than air", encounters his muse, dead friends and even Billy Collins along the way. Funny, moving, thought-provoking, it's quite a trip indeed, on which we're all beginners, hitchhiking our way across time.-Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and founder/director of The Writers StudioFrom the vantage point of his sixties, PJ Krass returns, in these wonderfully allusive poems, to his childhood in the 60s, that time of incense and headshops and Beatles and Stones in which both his selves, "the holy one / and the sinner," were shaped by a pop culture that zigzagged toward a "seemingly solid adult world." Then and now "a nation torn in two," this America of "disappointed dirt" still offers its muted pleasures: "Even the fortune teller's booth, / boarded up and empty, / keeps a secret of the past." That secret is almost revealed in elegiac poems tempered with humor and scored, always, with "a music strange but welcoming."-Michael Waters, author of Caw and other books of poetry; co-editor of Border Lines: Poems of Migration and other anthologies; Guggenheim Fellow; and five-time Pushcart Prize recipient

From gleaning to toothaches, across anxieties and economic precarity, Womer writes with gorgeous attention to language and to sound, creating a book quivering with insights. I loved this book.-TaraShea Nesbit, author of Beheld Brenna Womer's cost of living is meditative, subtle, and moving; it bursts with surprising and dynamic language that circles familial histories, complex intimacies, class, memory, and origin. Deeply intimate and carefully observed, Womer's writing reveals the expansive possibilities of both poetry and prose.-K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary Budgeting for Sensodyne while finding "no place, yet, to sell a memory," the narrator in Brenna Womer's hybrid collection, cost of living, knows both the heavy expense of connection and the ache of paying for one's place in the world. The weight of expectations press into the grit of love, leaving behind indelible scratches. Womer's work will leave you similarly marked.-Kristine Langley Mahler, author of Curing Season

These poems trace the arc of a woman emerging from the darkness of patriarchy and discovering the daylight shed by Kwan Yin, St. Brigid and the winged Medusa, as well as by women friends who also help her walk the distance for water, the archetypal element of Medusa. The collection is divided into four sections. From an appraisal of her spiritual discomfort it carries her, through encounters with art and through self-discovery in unfamiliar places, to the last section, which focuses on her guides and their role in moving the woman's consciousness toward joy and freedom as she continues walking into daylight. The collection includes translations by the poet of five French and German poems.

Enter if you dare, and enter you must into these enchanted, exquisite interiors, these wonder cabinets jam-packed with all the beautiful and necessary stuff: mystery, reverie, pleasure, and wisdom. Here we find an anonymous mermaid composing sea-salted epics and the biblical Jonah now a best-selling celebrity lost in the belly of a vacuum-cleaner. In poems that welcome us into the immensity of tiny galaxies, we are invited to nest and make mischief in party cakes, tornadoes, eggshells, kaleidoscopes, and fortune cookies. Maura Stanton, with a miniaturist's eye for detail and the agility of a master illusionist reveals the opulent and miraculous worlds thriving within the cracks, crevices, matchboxes, bedsprings, and trick closets of our imaginations. The poems summon us to sympathize with and to acknowledge the trapped, the endangered, and the disappeared in our lives and in our imaginations. And most poignantly to rethink the ways in which we think about the utilitarian in our day-to-day and in our dreams. These gorgeous and sumptuous poems all at once delight and serve as cautionary tales or fables to remind us that we ignore the seemingly insignificant at our peril and urge us to appreciate the extraordinary miracles in the ordinary objects that bless and inhabit our everyday lives.-Catherine Bowman What a delight to read these prose poems by Maura Stanton! Each poem is a treasure box of words where whimsy turns into wonder. Our "interiors" are the repositories for our hopes, dreams, ambitions, and fears-and Maura Stanton's Interiors shows us all those emotions and so much more. What dwells within isn't always what we think it is-and this book delves into all the nooks and crannies and couched versions of self and selves in a haunting yet highly accessible fashion. Interiors is allegory with style, delivered in deftly metaphorical poems that hit right where we live-those interiors that haunt us all, yet keep us going. I am grateful for the sharp wit and wise heart of Maura Stanton, and you will be too.-Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of Barefaced Woman In his classic THE PROSE POEM, Michael Benedikt noted the form's "visionary thrust", and Robert Bly elsewhere pointed out how it contained "all sorts of fantastic details." Yes, and the prose-poem is the Trickster of literature, wisdom and comedy cohabiting and cavorting; you never know what will happen next. I love this book, this shimmering magic box, this cave of wonders, amazingly inventive, surprises in every phrase. Place and time are no obstacle, but rather are invitations to invent, now inside a bottle, a bubble, now inside a whale, the Trojan horse or a fortune cookie. A totally new world is revealed via "le merveilleux". What discoveries,, what exciting adventures as we're bounded in a nutshell and count ourselves kings (and queens) of infinite space! I love this beautifully written collection, the finest I've seen in many a year.-Brian Swann, Professor of Humanities, The Cooper Union

All people must die, but everyone faces death in a different way. Tom Anastasis, a fifty-five-year old widower, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and is given six months to live. He goes to an island in the Caribbean to spend his last days there, where he fishes, snorkels, and surfs. He keeps a pooetic journal, telling of his last days, as he faces death head on by fully living until his spirit is released into the glorious afterlife.

"Wry, wise and humorous, these charming sketches offer a captivating look at the world through the eyes of dogs, Harold and Rosie, along with monkeys, mice, a turtle, a fire ant and one pet writer. Gritty and heartening, these fables give us a magical look at critters, creativity and life itself."-Denise Ryan (award-winning journalist and essayist)"Unconditional love for animals, art, words, and weirdness-a treat for us good humans."-Kayleigh Marinelli (The Fantastic Fabricated Life of Lyle Parker)"Here is a mad romp into the lives of animals that has elevated this human's consciousness to the point of bursting with sight and sound, taste and smell-what it is to touch the world in a more pure way; a work of expansive, fundamental empathy."-Miriam McEwen (Editor at South Carolina Review and the Swamp)"Genuine animal-sprinkled stories that will suck you in."-Gina Tron (Employment)

In her debut poetry collection, Selina Li Bi explores the loss and longing of people and place, a journey through memory and myth as a second-generation Asian American. The blurry margins of identity stir with the taste and sounds of family and the yearning to belong.

Melissa Boston's Edna is an inventive exploration of the pastoral mode that pulls from different sources of art and literature to construct a narrative about connection and wanting, love and failure, as well as acceptance. With three distinct speakers, the collection begins with an invoking of the title's only named speaker, and the reader is taken on an odyssey of a failed relationship that spans from the Hawaiian Islands to the Midwest. But with a lyrical tenderness, beauty is found in the ruins of these intimate moments, and the conversations that art and literature have with our lives is continued in a new paradigm of our interpreting and understanding of moments and places we inhabit.