Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet, he asks, if you had nothing, no sounds of the world coming to you, "would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?" Jennifer's book stays true to Rilke's "treasure-house" of childhood, exploring the richness of a youth growing up in California's farmland... "an island of yard/surrounded by oceans of trees." Jennifer Pickering's poems bring us home. -Robert Stanley, Poet Laureate Sacramento 2009-12What a pleasure it was to read Jennifer's work. Sometimes I simply sat back after reading a poem and said aloud, Wow! Her descriptions are shot through with originality and love. In one of her most powerful poems "The Alchemy of Grief," she writes, "In theory we begin our journeys at birth. Travel backwards moving forward." Take that journey with her in Fruit Box Castles. -Wendy Patrice Williams, In Chaparral: Life on the Georgetown Divide, California (Cold River Press) Bayley House Bard and Some New Forgetting. Her prose is published across the U.S.This collection illuminated with a sense of place: farms, orchards, family, "Mom midwifed rows of freestones...winter Mother sews hope into gingham curtains." There is much to delight in the sensory: stubbled fields, perfume of pears. Hard labor is honored, planting, harvesting, "summer saved in jars." And working in a cannery: "Hands that burn from sweet juice...where jobs were scarce as shade." "Morning light poured across the wooden planks," reminds one of Vermeer. -Jeanine Stevens is the author of, Limberlos, a six-time Pushcart Nominee and the winner of the national poetry award from WOMR.

Soil is a jagged journey through bewildering loss and recapture of love, of self, and of motherhood. It explores a woman's roots, the relationships that warp, buoy, and form her, and the bounty that inevitably blooms through gratitude. Two of the poems were finalists for Mid-American Review and North American Review's annual poetry awards. Inside you'll also find three color illustrations by Dorota Lagida-Ostling. Dig, bury, seed, unearth, and reap. Bring a shovel.

"The beautiful poems in Elizabeth Joy Levinson's Running Aground do not blink. They swim open eyed into the land of hard, sand-scrubbed love and loneliness and pain. And they speak for us girls so rarely seen in poems, difficult, poor, wild sea girls. These are poems of strong images and haunting lines, truth poems, father poems, ocean poems. It is a collection I will read and re-read again and again." -Leigh Camacho Rourks, author of Moon Trees and Other Orphans"Elizbeth Joy Levinson's Running Aground navigates us through ports of poverty, sea creatures, Florida & the dangers of opening one's mouth & speaking (or not). Thankfully, Levinson does speak out in these poems full of deft lyricism, pacing & powerful metaphors. She guides us through moments of peril like a jellyfish coming too close & the heartache in seeing a father run aground. These poems fuse images & language of land & sea, of ships & cars packed w/suitcases, of mermaids & girls reaching out w/fingers "trying/ to hold everything/ at once." With Levinson as our captain, the poems in Running Aground will steadily sail on & steer our way through troubled waters & time." -Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the Crown, winner of the 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize

And isn't the story of our lives the story of our women, the mythology we have lived and been bequeathed? Anna Mae Perillo's INHERITANCE OF COURAGE AND FEAR speaks, sings through memory and desire. Duality is here in these poems, excavated and resolved. She asks, what are we if not the humble and fierce products of some other country within our own? And what of the tension that lies in the answer, which is the reason for who we are and what we do, and, most importantly, what we leave in our wake. This collection is a beautiful remembrance and conjuring of what passes through us, and what brings us to our political and intimate moments, as alive as it is elegiac. Remember, it whispers, and we do. -VANESSA JIMENEZ GABB, author of Images for Radical Politics, Midnight Blue and Weekend Poems.If you think of a chapbook as a small book, you're going to have to adjust your judgement here. Anna Mae Perillo has sculpted a book that never remains personal because she introduces the individuals in her poems and then the reader to their connection with a much bigger world. Enter here and see how big a chapbook can get. -FRAN QUINN, author of A Horse of Blue Ink, co-author of Sound Ideas and the recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Prize.Anna Mae Perillo has created a "beautiful nest" of family and friends engaging each other and the world, celebrating victories, sharing worries. Her essential nature is to bloom: "To claw up through the dense soil/ To meet the sun," being present in each moment. -MYRA SHAPIRO, author of 12 Floors Above the Earth, I'll See you Thursday, and Four Sublets. Her poem "These are the Pearls" appeared in the New Yorker, July, 2019. She serves on the Board of Directors of Poets House.

In reading Joseph Hamel's poetry, you begin a walk down a familiar street and end up taking a turn you never have before or through a forest path that you thought you knew but now everything looks more marvelous and more frightful. And you take this walk with someone you care about; and you take this walk with yourself. A beautiful world surrounds with a "blue river" and "falling dark," with the "first alarm of autumn" and "spiders' webs" so full of grief and joy that these poems stun you with their love of being alive, and greet you on a "broken street" and dare to reveal heart and spine in an all too human voice knowing there is no arrival and departure, just the time we're on the road with each other and with ourselves. These poems revel in the "metal pail sound of a milk chute" or "fire inside the frost," at the same time that they seek a solitude so wonderful because it hurts. These poems confide to each other like the constant travelers in the novels of Thomas Bernhard, who carefully shape their words as they try to say the most heartfelt things a human can bear. These poems rise out of deep furrows cut by the words of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and seek to carry us into light no matter how heavy our burden. -John R. Harvey, playwright and poet, author of Rot and Night of the Giant

Working Woman Poetry by Claire L. Frankel is a delightful collection that asks the reader to ponder "What is a working woman's life?" Frankel invites the reader to travel through a landscape of emotions and circumstances in this brilliant new book. -Leah Huete de Maines

This is What was Next is a collection of contemporary poetry that binds a profound love and grief for the natural world with considerations of atheism, exploring and ultimately celebrating the freedom and healing to be found in self-honesty. McKay delights in sudden leaps between hallucinatory lyricism and meticulously patterned language games; between the starkly personal and tongue-and-cheek musings of artistic self-promotion.

It was my good fortune to work with Constance Alexander through the Kentucky Voices program at Horse Cave Theatre during the development of The Way Home. In this compelling piece, Constance combines a journalist's power of observation with a poet's use of language-and her own light heart-to skillfully create characters and situations dealing with tough end of life issues. A standing ovation for Constance for this script, and for her use of theatre as a forum to stimulate conversations on a challenging topic. -Liz Fentress, playwrightCancer. A simple word that echoed through my bones like an earthquake. And then the aftershock-I have no insurance. Through surgery and chemo, the bills piling up, at times I felt so lost. But not alone. When I think back to that time, a line from The Way Home shines like a beacon-There are people along the way who say, "Come this way. There are ways through all this." Constance Alexander is one of those people along the way. Her spoken word opera is a gift to be performed not only by professional actors, but by friends reaching out to friends, by strangers reaching out to strangers, by communities reaching out to reassure, to comfort, to guide us all home. I cannot express the depth of my gratitude. -Judy Sizemore, Survivor and Poet

If you want to know in many ways what coal mining felt like years ago, you will read Ben Campbell's clear, brilliant, and informative DARKER STILL. -John McKernan, author of Resurrection of the Dust

The Invisible Suitcase, Elaine Olund's debut collection, presents the poet's world using the deft brushstrokes of the artist she also is. "There's a word for everything', Olund tells us in one of several short poems exploring botanical terms; "this one means 'grow toward light.'" This book shimmers with the light of life all around us. Whether the poet's light shines on the image of wilting carnations-"So white. Dirty-edged though, like snow / charcoaled with car exhaust"-or on a mother who is "gray-tired/lost in a haze of Parliament smoke", these poems are rendered in full color, with images both fully themselves and bright windows into the human experience. -Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate, 2016-2018Elaine Olund's debut poetry collection, The Invisible Suitcase, twines around roots, growing towards the light, and letting go. Memory's roots burrow deep as the tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike "plunge..." her "...into darkness." Olund uses marcescence, the botanical process of holding on to old foliage, thwarting new growth, as a metaphorical warning. The speaker mourns loss while cutting into a strawberry, "slicing these little hearts wide open." Copper, a favorite color, morphs into a penny rolling out of reach, like a lover "no longer worth reaching for." Finally, releasing memories too tightly held allows the speaker to make a "Packing list for a new life," as "into the invisible suitcase, breath folded/neat as a silk scarf." -Ellen Austin-Li, Author of Firefly, Finishing Line Press, 2019For me a good poem is either a sort of controlled explosion or a journey. Olund has both kinds of poems in this collection. Some, like "Watching Carnations Wilt," have to be reread, danced with, as they slowly give up their secrets. Sharp images rise up, sink, and then re-surface. The Invisible Suitcase will take you to deep and real places and when you return to your life and the room and the book in your hands, everything is familiar, but richer and realer-strawberries are cut and hearts, bleeding. -Howard Wells, Editor & Book Developer

Karol Nielsen's new book sees the poet masterfully engaging with the question of how to define and communicate one's place in a complex world, speaking volumes about the society she inhabits. Nielsen, who is also an acclaimed author of two memoirs, paints vivid scenes that are as easy to visualize as they are suggestive and multilayered, at once real and metaphorical. Full of soul-searching, heartbreak, and the triumph of insight, this moving collection guides its readers through a personal journey full of historical resonance yet fully present in the here-and-now. -Anton Yakovlev, author of the chapbook Chronos Dines Alone, winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize 2018Karol Nielsen's collection carries the indelible grief of war and its many faces "like a prison tattoo." Her urban poems are populated by her father, neighbors, lovers, famous actors, and people she encounters on the New York City streets. Striking and unforgettable, the war stories seep into her poems. The distant wars of Vietnam and Afghanistan permeate the wars of everyday life. From this hopelessness, tender love poems rise like "small bursts of color/then full, fat blooms." -Claudia Serea, author of Twoxism

Sliver of Change is a debut collection of twenty-four poems by Marianne Brems. The collection revolves around the theme of transformations, small ones, big ones, frightening ones, peaceful ones that occur at every moment. Her vignettes of everyday life explore quirks of human nature as well as curious aspects of the physical world. Author Audrey Kalman says "These are pieces that appear quotidian but reveal deeper truths. You'll want to read them more than once to connect with the power and emotion lurking under their surfaces."

Here is a poet who dares to venture beyond the familiar terrain of shadows and regret, stepping free instead into the dangerous territory of radiance. But Beth Kress is no blind optimist. She focuses her lens on the loss of her brother and the bullet-riddled streets of Sarajevo as steadily as she does on the ordinary, gorgeous banalities of motherhood, friendship, and family. Her poems are lustily generous, issuing an urgent invitation to her reader - in sorrow as well as happiness, or simply in repose - to rejoice with her. -Frannie Lindsay, author of If Mercy and Our VanishingIn Taking Notes, Beth Kress pays close and loving attention to the narrative details of family history and to her own. She often writes poems of endings and beginnings, as early in the book "The Trunk" imagines her ancestors' painful departure from England, their new life and discoveries in America. Later, she narrates her own transitions with humor, honesty and celebration. She has a gift for the telling detail: the single tin mailbox listing slightly, as seen by a lonely young mother in "On Simonton Road;" the stranger in "Going Down," who falls in the subway: a knapsack like that could break your heart. "What I Brought to Provincetown" could be an index and guide to this whole moving book. Kress didn't bring a compass there, but she did indeed bring a heart. -Susan Donnelly, author of Capture the Flag and The Finding DayBeth Kress's poems embrace us in the sweep of their celebration. In clear and fluent language she plumbs inherited experience: the gesture of hands, the flavor of childhood. Reading this collection feels like walking with a friend. Her lines can call up the bud of a baby's mouth, or stretch back miles and generations. In and through them all runs that sense of the current that connects us, tidal, overwhelming. These poems, like the author's memories, hover beside us in kitchens or countrysides, "dusting off their flour-coated hands/across the decades." They pull us in, "the distance between us/much thinner than we thought." -Jessie Brown, author of Lucky and What We Don't Know We Know

"Amid the many delicious feasts contained in Full Mouth-ranging from caviar and oysters to donuts and dumplings-you'll find the "sweet improbable globes" of oranges, and the batter of funnel cakes wiggling "across a lake of boiling oil," expansive descriptions that insist on the transcendent experience that food can offer us. And what Eddy offers us here is a globe-trotting, memory-packed, omnivorous bounty of poems that interrogate appetite in all its forms. Through the full-mouth music of Eddy's language, this book explores family, intimacy, what nourishes and sates, and what it truly means to break bread." -Matt Donovan, author of two collections of poetry-Vellum (Mariner, 2007) and the chapbook Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press, 2017)-as well as the collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press, 2016). He is Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College.

Janet McMillan Rives shares her poetry inspired by decades spent in the prairie states of the American Midwest. Join her as she drives through the Sandhills of Nebraska enjoying lovely vistas and subtle wildflowers. Become a part of the lush green Iowa cornfields which cover the state from river to river, the Missouri to the Mississippi. Discover the region's countryside, small towns, and people who reside in these poems. Included in this collection are poems which garnered prizes from both the Iowa Poetry Association and the Arizona State Poetry Society as well as other poems published in national and regional journals.

Lesley Clinton's Calling the Garden from the Grave explores our restless human yearnings and spiritual endurance. Pieces in this collection have won awards from the Poetry Society of Texas, Press Women of Texas, and the Houston Poetry Fest. Settings as vast as the West Texas desert and intimate as a one-bedroom apartment invite the reader to both adventure and contemplation. In these pages, the reader meets trailblazers and homebodies, mothers and daughters, lovers and loners, the famed and the obscure. Each wrestles in some way with a God-given calling. Each struggles to bloom in soil made dry by quotidian loss or past transgressions. Clinton offers a sacramental view of the world informed by her Catholic faith. No small grace goes unseen in these poems; each tiny sacrifice and moment of growth is honored. This collection brings God's numinous, intangible space of fortitude and renewal into the abundant, greening poetry garden.

The poems of Everything reaches out to everything else explore the nature of our world now and the interconnectedness of all life. Poems are set in the older urban neighborhoods of Los Angeles which are bounded by the LA River that was thwarted and yet is reclaiming itself. These poems capture longings, fears, and the beauty of the moment, all set among the anxiety of living now. This chapbook Includes the poem, Atwater, winner of the Crossing Boundaries Award for Innovative and Experimental Writing from International Quarterly.

In linked haikus, Diane Vreuls captures events in her outer and inner landscape during a passing season. Starting with the close at hand, ("the first red leaf / sets fire to the hedges"), she moves to the larger world in a quick progression from sight to insight. Daft and deft, FALL is a delight: a small book with a large heart.

Amanda Gomez's Wasting Disease is the antithesis of the vajazzled pussies of which she writes. The collection's poems strip away social constructs, to expose naked pain. Little girls disintegrate like diseased starfish. The Jets rape Anita because she's a brown girl. A dreamer performs her mother's autopsy, clearing out the torso to make a maternal space for herself. Lips become scissors. And love is venomous. Gomez takes us to the brink of confusion, rage, fear, abandonment, despair-the horrors of a people in steep decline-and holds us on the precipice with a final line of disconcerting commentary, a new kind of nakedness ... a lesson in scars. Read the collection. See us our worst. Hope for something better. -Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher of Writers ResistWhat is language in the hands of a poet? Should it yield smoothness, a polished and easy finish? That would be too easy. In the poetry of Amanda Gomez, language is above all restored to its true function, so we might trust it again and give it the proper respect- for its capacity to expand rather than merely limit experience, for its ability to render visible rather than subdue or eclipse. If an autopsy is meant to see into the flayed body, poetry is meant to lovingly return it to itself. "Please, don't take me for tragic," she asks; for this is a poet brave enough to "wear the galaxy like a dress." -Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser and The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis"Amanda Gomez spares no one and no thing in her brilliant and sharp debut, Wasting Disease. 'I guess what I am saying is, every girl / learns to disintegrate' she tells us, not in resignation but in rage. This is a book of so many things-yes, rage, but there is so much more. Gomez writes 'Everywhere I stare my shadow is running.' And haven't we all known that place? That place of self-loathing and displacement? In Wasting Disease, Gomez sticks her hands deep in the mud to pull out all the things we have buried, not to shame us, but to ask "who made us feel this way?" The fingers point in complicated directions-to gender, to race, to colonization, to language, to ourselves-but make no mistake: Wasting Disease is not a book asking you to come clean. Rather, it begs you to dance in all the facets of your humanity, light and dark." -Nishat Ahmed, Author of Field Guide for End Days and Brown Boy

"Against the horrors of history, these poems seek to give urgent voice to the women so often erased from the record. In Leibowitz's imagination, time periods collapse; the Annunciation or the trial of Artemisia Gentileschi have all the freshness and verve of today. 'Teach me what to do with these pink obligations,' she asks in a poem. In the truest sense of ecphrasis, Leibowitz speaks out of these pictures to the fragility and endurance of faith and of art. -Richie Hofmann, PhD, Pushcart Prize recipient and author of Second Empire (2015)"As lush in its imagery as it is uniquely precise, HYPATIA AT THE MUSEUM grants new agency to the archetypal maiden. These intricately-wrought poems glimmer, swell, and burst with talent. M.G. Leibowitz has given us all a true gift." -Leslie Sainz, 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist

Light is haunting. It illuminates and takes away, exposing the Louisiana coast and its disappearance, highlighting childhood memories, trying to make sense of death, addiction, navigating guilt, and remembrance. The loss becomes both personal and national with the loss of so many African Americans at the hands of police and the importance of "say his( her, their) name" made popular by the Black Lives Matter movement. The poem "Exile" focuses on the loss of Micheal Brown and the chaos and rage and injustice felt by the nation, "be island, be glass, be a man with his hands up," in which the see the grand possibility of a life with the simply gesture of innocence in the description of hands raised above your head. In the poem titled "Shots into Day", we dream of a boy becoming something new, becoming the sky, a bird, or better yet bullet proof. Loss and grief take its last turn with the weaving of an unexpected death of a female friend in a car accident and the murder of the young woman Mickey Shunick. The deaths of these women push us to reexamine our place as a woman in society and the violence and beauty of the female body. We see how women just fade into night, a metaphor for societies perception, disposable and sexualized, as though woman are "undetectable, untraceable, unseen" a line from"Before Dusk." Evoking Frank Bidart's famous piece "Ellen West", the poem titled "Carol Anne Boone" shows us how we have become too occupied with the male story, evidence of the increased popularity of new serial killer dramas on Netflix. The poem titled "Carol Anne Boone" shows a possibility of her perspective and voice that was swallowed up from public view. We are then lead to tales of the narrators sexualization as a young child in poem titled "Blue Nude," where we imagine the female body as anything, "bird, bunny, anything for body". These deaths evoke a death of the narrator and create a sexual reawakening and new found love. Love becomes reimagined. We live a short abusive relationship in poems titled "Artifacts," "Codependency" and "Roadkill," where we feel the strains of controlled love and the release of finding new love in poems titled "Soft Beginnings." Love then appears all around. C.D. Wright's famous collection Deep Step Come Shining repeats the word love. In the poem titled "Stripmall for C.D. Wright" differentiates love, " bullet love" , "Elvis love", "bird love". Love of all kinds surrounds us and the collection ends with two erasures one of a page from Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and the other of Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. In the end, we have reemerged with a new love: love of loss, love of grief, and love of new, and are left to hold on and let go to become one with light and sheen.

Rick Henry's little novel, Colleen's Count, Wednesday, August 16th, 1933, has a Joycean air and ear to it, a lightness in its depth, but only if Joyce had been a feminist living in the Adirondacks in the Depression era 30's. The title character is an Everywoman whose spirit, strength, and humanity ring true. Reading Colleen is like finding some precious object buried in rich mulch. -Stuart BartowRick Henry's short novel is a tour de force about women's lives in the Adirondacks in the 1920s and early 30s. Ostensibly about cars, it gradually reveals itself to be about those entwined eternal verities: sex, death and money. (And cars. And movies). Though slim, the book successfully brings to life an entire town, and era, as seen through the eyes of one woman, Colleen O'Shea Pierce, going about her day in 1933; in the process, she reveals herself to be far more Molly than Leopold Bloom. The book stays with you, troubling and disturbing, raising questions with no clear answers, much like life itself, -Barbara Ungar

A young married couple is surprised by an unexpected pregnancy. To wrestle with the onset of a multitude of wavering emotions, author Johanna DeBiase begins writing poetry. As the seasons change from winter to spring to summer to fall, she experiences the joys, fears and mysteries of pregnancy and finally, childbirth. She collects her poems together into an artful chapbook titled appropriately, Gestation. Gestation reflects the nature of creation in both art, nature and humanity. Through these poems we discover the struggle for acceptance, the joy of surrender, the anticipation of the unknown and the bliss of the culmination of waiting to finally birth your creation into the world.

Poems of growing up and growing older, holding on and letting go, paying tribute while always paying attention to the sidewalk cracks and the small, itchy places.Memories, "[g]one like steam from the glass," yet recaptured in Merrill Oliver Douglas's calm, level gaze. These quiet, uncompromising accounts are both more loving and more revealing for their refusal of sentiment. Funny, rueful, opening on unexpected depths, but above all accepting-her poems celebrate "the everyday weather of home." -Stephanie Strickland, author of How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected and Ringing the ChangesMerrill Oliver Douglas' Parking Meters into Mermaids is rich with transformation: daughter to mother, body to spirit, domestic to global. "Summer, in My Early Twenties," includes the lines, "Nights when the t-shirt stuck to my back, / and I could feel the hairs sprout on my legs, / why didn't some grayer, fatter woman // sit me down and say, 'Sweetie, this isn't your life. / This is weather.'" "Harvest" describes a pepper's unlikely winter bloom as "a small fruit, gnarled // as a toothless gnome." The poem abruptly shifts: "We won't eat it. / It's not food we're after, // just this off-kilter, out-of- / proportion pleasure of seeing / kinked, bare bones give birth." Each poem in this collection shimmers with off-kilter, out-of-proportion pleasure. -Suzanne Cleary, author of Beauty Mark (2013) and Crude Angel (2018), both from BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)