Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

Naiad Blood, a first collection of poetry by Sarah C. Beckmann, describes the story of a young woman who discovers herself in the sport of rowing-although she grew up near the sea, she falls in love with boats and the water all over again, in a whole new way. Crew not only provides her with an avenue for personal growth, but also alters her outlook on life. Taking creative inspiration from Greek myths and other cultural ideas around womanhood, Naiad Blood acknowledges social norms and issues that women face, and also directly challenges them. These poems embrace change, freedom, and power; they demonstrate that women should be able to engage with masculinized realms-to gain muscle or cut off their hair. And these poems are also an ode to the sport itself, to the magical and spiritual aura that the experience of being in a boat, and being on the water lends.

"Lisbeth Coiman is a dazzling new voice. With tender rage, she excavates what it means to love and grieve a homeland."-Ariel Gore, author of Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells, and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance and F*ck Happiness."Lisbeth Coiman writes 'Before I was born / A pristine future / streamed down from El Ávila tributaries' in the opening of her poem "El Guaire." With these words and beyond, I am also taken to my point in history, the promise that we are all born into without knowing what's to come, and how we are as individuals and as a collective, forced to reckon with a past that we are killing off to chase a promise of a better future. For immigrants, this carries a bigger weight, as we are both killers of self while our selves are so often the victims of a society that wants to kill us. Coiman's collection is a deeply personal work that makes us revisit the guilts and the angers that we carry."-Chiwan Choi, author of The Yellow House"UPRISING/ALZAMIENTO es un libro desgarrador, sincero y nostálgico. Se entremezclan los recuerdos de infancia, el exilio y los retos de la enfermedad mental. Es además un testimonio de vivir y narrar entre lenguas."-Nathalie Bouzaglo, editora de Excesos del Cuerpo, y autora de Ficción Adulterada."Weaving history, current events, and personal narrative, Lisbeth Coiman takes us on a vivid exploration of what it means to rise up, as a Venezuelan both within the country and from afar, as an immigrant in new lands, and as a woman in patriarchal societies. Longing and loss mix with resolve and resilience as Coiman teaches us that uprisings are never simple or painless, but that they can be beautiful and are almost always necessary on the path towards a more just world. Uprisings / Alzamiento is that "despertador en tu mesa de noche // Una campana en tus oídos" ("clock on your beside table // ringing in your ears") we all need right now, waking us up to the urgent need to take action in the face of injustice even when-especially when-we are afraid of what might come next.-Li Yun Alvarado, author of Words or Water"

The Silent Ones, Michael McMahon's sweeping debut, introduces a child dwelling in a garden of shadows that wound and sustain. "The Wish" suggests how he ties his father's sudden death to a grim jingle he mockingly directed at his napping father. The roots of his guilt are established in poems like "Quiet Time" and "Holy Writ" where the scowls of stern nuns in his Catholic grade school become internalized sources of shame. Juxtaposed to this guilt are poems like "Headwaters" and "Picnic at Taughannock" that celebrate blessings bestowed by family.In Part II of The Silent Ones, forces that harm and heal flow into a natural world that mirrors and shapes the personal. "Wilderness" is haunted by dissonant cries of coyotes tearing through boughs of Jeffery pine throughout the night. In "Raptor" the poet cowers from the drumming wings of a red-tailed hawk in attack. Conversely, "Camping by the Klamath" celebrates mule deer osprey and damsel flies at streamside, one of the many poems in Part II that laud the natural world's ability to grant restorative grace.The final section, attempting to resolve these tensions, invokes powers of ancestry. Here the poems depict the loving trust of parents, grandparents, granduncles and aunts who, remembering how it was, forgive him over and over, up to and beyond their graves.

There is abundance in Erica Manto Paulson's premiere poetry collection, Hunger. An abundance of image, of story, of knowledge, of the brimming silence which "all things holy" know is "the only way to get through." At its wise heart, Hunger is a reflection on motherhood, in both its most intimate and communal forms. "Who feeds them?" asks a young daughter about children pulled from their mothers' breasts at this country's border. These poems know the reciprocity of nourishment given and received. And in this exchange, "we are opened, / we close / the world expands again."-Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate EmeritusThis is a book about the hunger for love with which we come into the world, and its imagery takes us on a journey to the deepest reaches of our affection for one another. The poet gives birth to a daughter and dreams "they rummaged / through every drawer of my body / to find her." She remembers how proud her son was when he discovered her nose ring as he suckled, "looking up as if to let me know / it was there." She teaches her children the noun bird for "your red heart / flitting in front of you / on the branches." It may be, as Louise Glück has written, that we see the world only once, in childhood, but the poems of Erica Manto Paulson come about as close as language can take us to a second look. -David Lee Garrison, author of Light in the River (2020) Dos Madres PressIn Hunger, Erica Manto Paulson celebrates a keen appetite for life and love. A mother delights in her own ability to cure with abundant breast milk, a young girl almost smothers her new baby sister with excess kisses, a daughter adds mythic memory to her C-section birth story, and a son marks his growing independence with a vampire cartoon that says "I love you more than all the flowers." These poems yearn in their sweet balance of story, song, and imagination, inviting the reader to "open your mouth wide and it will be filled with good things." This poet's debut chapbook teaches us to name love, need, and loss for each other. You will be hungry for more.-Roberta Schultz, author of Touchstones (2020) Finishing Line Press

Moriah Cohen's poems in this collection, Impossible Bottle, come together in this grand and cool intersection between the blood-pumping heart and the dendrite smashing brain. They live in that space and in this domain, they constantly surprise. These poems are physically and mystically driven. When an ephemeral state and a solid body collide we get lines like, "At the far end of a dream, I slice a part down the center of my hair, sink a guthook into a lamb's sternum." That word 'guthook' is emblematic of all the sweet sharpness in this collection. They remind me of the big band music of Charles Mingus. In particular his tune, "Boogie Stop Shuffle." Her poems do all three-they boogie, and they stop, and they shuffle. There is a music in this collection, Impossible Bottle, that is raw and dirty and tender and sweet. The title tells you immediately. Say it out loud. Sing it. Impossible Bottle. There is nothing out of reach here. Everything is possible.-Matthew Lippman

Artists speak of negative space as an important part of any composition. In 1819, Keats wrote about how "straining against particles of light in the midst of a great darkness...is the very thing in which consists poetry." Poets are thus familiar with the power of the via negativa-the white space surrounding words, the silences between passages, are never empty. Rather, by turns they shimmer and bristle with the enormity of the unsaid. It takes not only skill but also great love and courage to write toward those places where a wound has been inflicted, whether in the aftermath of family tragedy or of the world's larger raft of trauma. In the poems of Tracy Rice Weber, we find a poet gifted with such a generous capacity for tenderness, and one who shows us how the careful carpentry of words not only builds or mends, but also allows even the joints and hasps to sing.-Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts & Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia 2020-22In Tracy Rice Weber's All That Keeps Me, the ordinary is made luminous. Fireflies, sand dunes, daffodils, brown bags and buckshots, all matter of making and unmaking, are turned over in new light. Here, hands are "tools, not ornaments" fit for use and usefulness. They salvage and mourn, for some, they wither. For others, hands become distant memory, like the rest of the worn body, undone. Giving words to the wordless and grace to what's mostly overlooked, Rice Weber's poems herald the gods of all comfort: nameless saints staving off empty cupboards, protecting heirlooms, allowing for grocery store reverie. The poet feels what so many feel when threading the difficult stitch of family: "There/ are fathers and mothers for every/ space left in me." And a child's wonder, when does it turn? What a burden love is, this fear we all collect of losing what we most want to hold. This work is a record and recollection, a timeless desire, to burrow into the minutia of our living, and come back with something to show for it.-Remica Bingham-Risher, author of What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error "In All That Keeps Me, Tracy Rice Weber makes visible 'the gray geometry' of sorrow. Rooted in the restless intimacies of the familial, her poems don't flinch-her clear-eyed language brings us close to the pain and to the tenderness. What wounds also tethers. Rice Weber's poems-beautiful, resonant-will stay with me for a long time."-Eduardo C. Corral, author of GuillotineA stunning chaplet that trills in a space of honest vibration between the feral and the domestic. In soft brilliance, link by link, here is a chain of history that breaks the reader over and again. Every time I return to this manuscript the reservoir of its detail fills an entire world's worth of sound, image, and the infinite minutiae of life that would spear our imaginations. Here are poems that do the hard work of dying. Here are poems that blaze up, afire, with what it is to be human. This is poetry that reaches. All That Keeps Me will seize you with its beauty, unfettered as the wind.-Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, author of D¿mos

Stacie M. Kiner's beautiful, wise, merciful collection Inventory begins with the words of Eavan Boland about "the surface of things," how they "barely hold...what is under them," then deftly, subtly, and keenly mines these real and metaphorical surfaces, and as readers, we are all the richer for it. She does not expound, but rather, asks often heart-stoppingly astute questions of the largest themes of our lives: death and the dead ("where aren't they?"), love ("a small/hard word"), loss, longing, memory, the natural and inevitable world, and how to live in it.-Elisa AlboThere aren't many poets who can do what Stacie M. Kiner does in her chapbook, Inventory. She has that rare ability to write spare, crystalline poems that pack a punch. Moreover, Kiner cuts through excess "fat" with a scalpel. Her poems bleed while they sing. I confess I didn't read these poems, rather, I tumbled through them. It's what happens when you fall in love with her words, her exquisite language.-Lenny DellaRoccaIn these deftly crafted poems, Stacie M. Kiner performs a raw and honest inventory of objects and moments that accrete meaning. However, this work is far from dull and dutiful; with a lively curiosity and a restless desire for life, these poems carry and celebrate all the beautiful and brutal moments that together make a life.-Emma Bolden"When your body/decides it wants/its own words" is a perfect summation of Stacie M. Kiner's poems. They are both visceral and lyrical at the same time, taking you on a trip into her very personal and expansive world. Her words here always seem to be the right words, the words her body wants.-Dr. Barbra Nightingale

"The poet's work to establish agency in the midst of sickness is so clear and hard fought, that one is filled with admiration and wonderment at the ability to carry the reader so deep into her journey with all of its subcurrents."-MARY STEWART HAMMOND, author of Out of Canaan (W.W. Norton, 1991) & Entering History (W.W. Norton, 2016)"These poems interrogate seizure disorder and recovery, its spectrum, the people around it, family, community. In those waters swim a sense of history, distortion, victimhood, the inevitability of scapegoating, in fact, discrimination and racism. The poems themselves seize. Their strongest light is their willingness to inhabit the very "kindling" of the neurons, "the highway clothed in goldenrod." Indeed, as the poet writes in "Blue Electrode," the title poem, "Yes, my mother thinks to herself/ tying her torn scarf,/ the words Epilepsy and Woe/ are synonymous."-RALPH BURNS, author of but not yet (Lynx House Press, 2017) Winner of The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, & Ghost Notes (Oberlin College Press, 2000), Winner of The Field Poetry Prize

This chapbook of poetry is set in a rich Alaskan landscape. Throughout these poems, place, weather, and nature are the vehicle through which family, motherhood, parenting, and marriage are explored. There is a sense of longing and loss, renewal and wonder, that leaves the reader wanting more.

Mid-Bloom is one woman's exploration of grief, illness, and survival as she faces a breast cancer diagnosis. Having lost her mother to cancer two decades prior, author Katie Budris is forced to confront that loss again as her own treatment unearths a deep longing to connect with her late mother. Through a loosely chronological structure, these poems invoke nostalgia through childhood memories and use nature-centered imagery to guide the reader through some of her most difficult experiences. Described by Abbey J. Porter of Mad Poets Society as "accessible poems... with a quiet ferocity," Budris taps into the difficult realities of adulthood and mortality we all must face.

Featuring poems by:Pamela AhlenMary ArderyPhillip BannowskyKaren BerryGary BloomJack C. BuckJeff BurtPamela Hobart CarterAmanda Lin CostaCarol DeeringAnn DeVilbissIris Jamahl DunkleSusan Melinda DunlapSara EddyCeleste EmmonsAndy FogleLaura FoleyChristine GelineauMike GoodAtreyee GuptaLois Marie HarrodKatherine HesterEmily Alta HockadayAlicia HokansonMary Christine Kane

The fourth book of poetry by this New York City poet, Walter Holland's Reconstruction is a work of poetic reconciliation with his boyhood in Lynchburg, Virginia. Weaving both vivid lyric language into these short narrative poems, Holland reconstructs a flawed yet nostalgic past. Uprooted northerners, Holland, his sisters, and his parents sought the bucolic charm and unfettered economic opportunity of 1950s Virginia.But boyhood brought with it a complex emotional and psychological complicity with the perverse cultural mores and institutionalized racism of the south. White, privileged, and sexually conflicted, Holland, who was drawn to the arts, negotiated a world of natural beauty and solitary retreat. His mother struggled with depression. His father, a doctor, kept true to the stoic virtues of fifties masculinity. Middle-class and affluent, Holland went to ballroom lessons, piano lessons, lived in a home attended to by a maid, and grew into a society, on the one hand as an outsider-northern born, Catholic, liberally inclined, studying modern dance and performing in community theater-and on the other felt obliged upon to take a date to her debutante party, attend the cotillions, hunt on one occasion, and obediently comply with the rules of segregation.Holland's poems weave the rural landscape of Virginia and its distinct country local with the burgeoning arrival of suburbanization and corporate industrialization in the late fifties. He gives a sense of the swift transition from the old south to the New South. He layers his poems on top of the brutal remains of the Civil War, the daily evidence of the Jim Crowe south, the rotting foundations of tobacco shacks, segregated neighborhoods, and aged downtown businesses. He describes the prosperity of the sixties, a race riot at his high school, the institutionalization of his mother for shock-treatments, and the travel-hungry father who circles the globe.Above all these are poems that will evoke the beauty of a remembered past and its many illusory and problematic realities.

Held Together with Tape and Glue consists of 17 poems, including erasures and collage. The visual collage of the cover art uses a photo which inspired the first poem in the collection, "Flight Over a Quiet Square."¿

"A tightly-unified series of Biblical portraits, Channeling Matriarchs makes use of archetypes still relevant to present selfhood. A fine first book."-Michael Kriesel, Hearst Award Winner, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Past President"In the patriarchal society of the Bible, chances for a woman to be remembered at all depended largely on the fame of husband, father, brother. Through line, phrase, or sometimes single words, Lynn Aprill subtly reveals the feelings, thoughts, motives of 16 named or nameless women, giving them a life of their own. Thus, Lot's wife looks back to mourn her sodomized daughters; Jael is recognized for her heroic killing of the Israelites' enemy; Dinah hints that her brothers' murder of Shechem, thereby "rescuing" her from his bed, is not at all appreciated. Channeling Matriarchs is a remarkable first-time publication by a very promising poet."-Irene Zimmerman, OSF, Catholic Press Association, 2020 First Place Winner in Poetry Book Category, Greenfield, WI

Do, please, check out the final stanza of "Flutter" for a nutshell demonstration of sound gorgeously orchestrated in language, or look at the sly echo of "things" and "rings" (with its diminuendo in "tightening" a few lines later) in this collection's first poem. But I don't want to imply that This Bony Cabinet is just one long tone poem. Billy the Kid awaits you here, and the architect Louis Sullivan, and the three major icons of twentieth century physics/cosmology, and ¿¿¿ well, maybe the heart of your own bony cabinet is knocking inside these lines too. Enjoy! -Albert Goldbarth, two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle awardThe terrain of the poems in Kim Horner McCoy's This Bony Cabinet includes roadside memorials, architectural monuments, and Interstate mileposts along a lightly-peopled diagonal between Chicago and eastern New Mexico. Birds frozen in sculpture, the shock of world events rattling the order, a way woke coyote tale, F5 tornadoes, weaponized airplanes falling from the sky, coiled rattlesnakes beside the trail-McCoy writes with lithographic remembrance, cataloguing unexpected detours, missing sections of map, and the lingering effects of disasters-both personal and collective-in her journey through early 21st Century America. -George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of KansasKim Horner McCoy writes from her soul. The poems in THIS BONY CABINET reveal an ear for language and a voice all her own. A mesmerizing debut. -Johnny D. Boggs, eight-time Spur Award winner

Humming the Thing is infused with the celebratory as Theresa Hamman takes us to the land of myth and magic. With elements of steampunk style and ethos, and through such innocuous images as worms, curlers, birds, and apples, we find ourselves in an environment some would call austere: a world of "smeared black/lead" and "tear stained buttery paper/with a frowning sun." Humming the Thing, is grounded in the strength that what is invisible and unknown are supported by forces beyond this planet. Hamman puts these to good use as distress calls and as the expression of wonderment. An exciting new collection by one of rural Oregon's experimental voices, Humming the Thing funnels these essentials of survival into lyrical, kaleidoscopic musings, making us want to sing along.-Susan Kay Anderson author of MezzanineThe universal theme of loss, in all its many forms, permeates Hamman's second chapbook of poems, Humming the Thing. Hamman has a unique way of writing about ordinary things, and this is especially so in her poem, 'A Mind Without a Bird.' Many of her poems are personal, such as the wistful 'Urgent Prayer,' when she writes about how 'the weight of years scrawls a marquee across my mother's forehead, bends her back.' One of my favorite poems in this outstanding collection is 'Rural Oregon. Tuesday. In September,' with all its acute sensory observations. Hamman's poignant words strike all the right notes of indelible loss in this noteworthy collection of poems.-Dianne Alvine author of Child's PlayFor years, I have admired Theresa Hamman's unflinching eye and sharp ear for the exactly right turn of phrase in her beautifully honest poetry. She uses the immediate details of daily life-the birth of a new granddaughter, the start of a spring that promises nothing but more cold rain-as an invitation for her reader to delve more deeply into their lives as well, illuminating what John Updike called "the human news," those stories and relationships that can't help but sustain us.-James Crews, Editor of How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude & Hope

refinding the rules of gravity by Anna Antongiorgi is a book full of the magic of young-woman-artist-human moving to New York City energy. The poems reference Taylor Swift, but also Gertrude Stein. They're sparks of comedy alongside heartache, and a healthy dose of nostalgia. In and among all of this, the collection is a story about getting back up: a ballet dancer finally coming back to dancing-happy, spunky, silly, devastating, fabulous dancing. This work speaks to the up, as well as the down, and the sometimes sideways motion of twenty-something confusion, conflict, curiosity, and joy.

In Some Tanka in Thanks to Elroy, Not the Most Cantankerous Dog, Glenn D'Alessio shares his great love of Elroy, his rat terrier who accompanied him on walks, during his travels, and at home. In "To a Dog Person", D'Alessio writes "The thing is, even when wizened/ with age, and jumping in sleep, / he's but a light nudge / away from the present / and all attention / when we are demanding / a little understanding and love." The poems are small gems and encapsulate the relationship between dog and man without judgment, but with complete acceptance of both dog and human behaviors. Oh, that all of us could learn from Elroy and open to the beauty of the world.-Susan Roney-O'Brien, Author of Thira, Earth, Farmwife, Legacy of the Last World, Bone Circle, and 1990 Winner of the Worcester County Poetry Association Poetry Prize, and 2020 Winner of the Stanley Kunitz Medal.Glenn D'Alessio's Some Tanka in Thanks to Elroy, Not the Most Cantankerous Dog is a charming portrait of a beloved companion. Each poem reveals a fetching aspect of Elroy expressed with humor and humility. The blend of Tanka and free verse frame every piece in a complementary form. I grew ever fonder of dog and man with each passing page. Ventured with them transported by D'Alessio's vivid capture of place, his awareness of the role senses play in scenes. The collection's Postscript poignantly portrays the poet and his his pairing with Elroy. It offers peace, an elegy to love.-Richard H. Fox, Author of TIME BOMB, wandering in puzzle boxes, You're my favorite horse, The Complete Uncle Louie Poems, and embracing the burlesque of collateral damage. 2017 Winner of The Frank O'Hara Prize.

"Starting with the first line of the first poem, 'The night that bled into the morning my son died,' I read this collection straight through with my heart in my throat. Reader, prepare yourself: once you start reading What I Should Have Said, you won't be able to stop. After reading these poignant poems, which are full of joy as well as sorrow, I feel that I, too, knew Kyle, and I miss him very much."-Lesléa Newman, author of I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father"What I Should Have Said is a raw and painful chronicle of a bereaved mother's journey through losing her child to the disease of addiction. I've been struggling with the death of our second son, Christopher, and Lanette's words really helped me move forward in my grief. Her brutal honesty allowed me to process Christopher's death from alcohol addiction. I'm encouraged by her "List of Hopes" at the end of the book and have begun writing my own list. I thank the author for shedding light on the darkness and stigma attached to the disease of addiction and for reminding us that our children were and are so much more than their addictions."-Kathy Corrigan, Board President, Bereaved Parents of the USA"If it were fiction, if it did not lacerate the heart to know the truth behind it, Lanette Sweeney's poetry memoir about losing a child to drugs would only be tragically beautiful. As it is, it is devastating, featuring poetry by her lost son Kyle [Fisher-Hertz] along with her own. Speaking the unspeakable for her own peace, and for the understanding of the rest of us, is Sweeney's mission. The only thing better than reading these tender, elegiac, broken words would be for her to never have needed to write them."-Jacquelyn Mitchard, author, The Deep End of the Ocean and 18 other novels

Drawing on the works of Jack Spicer, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jacque Derrida, Donika Kelly, JG Ballard, Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie, Deleuze & Guattari, Philip K. Dick, HP Lovecraft, David Lynch, Andrea Rexilius, numerous pop/rock musicians, film, and surrealist art, A Void and Cloudless Sky creates a landscape of comedy, dream, horror, drama, family, life, and death. From locations as familiar as the dive bar to the technological cyberspace of networks, nodes, and artificial intelligence, a human experience both familiar and strange is laid out for the reader. Crustaceans trade barbs with waitstaff, the essays of Kurt Vonnegut rub against the music of Thom Yorke, random chance collides with intentionality in an organized chaos that is both accessible and dense, highbrow and lowbrow, like "Tom Waits eating flies / in Dracula."A short work with a wide breadth, A Void and Cloudless Sky is a quick read of great depth. It is poetry for rereading.

April J. Asbury's debut poetry collection, Woman with Crows, explores the roles of women from childhood to adulthood. From "Big-Kid Legends" to "The Obituary Phase of Life," Asbury weaves together the voices of myth, folklore, and family story. What emerges is a vibrant tapestry of family, love, and loss. Crystal Wilkinson, author of Birds of Opulence, suggests the poems "delve into mythologies old and new." Mina from Dracula makes an appearance, as do the unnamed sister of Icarus and a certain sleepy, apple-eating princess. Many of the poems explore traditional tasks, such as cleaning, canning, and caregiving, as Rita Quillen, author of Wayland and Some Note You Hold. These are poems of "the complex social contract," Quillen says, "that women sign without knowing it." Keeping the family history, preserving the stories as efficiently as the summer's harvest, Woman with Crows feels the weight of the past while flying toward survival. This is a book "engaged with deeper, more difficult beauties of the world," according to Diane Gilliam, author of Kettlebottom and Dreadful Wind & Rain. "These poems have a wingspan that gathers both light and dark, silence and voice, this side and the other." From this side to the other, Woman with Crows prepares to make journey both familiar and strange . . . But always full of wonder.