Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

When is filled with secrets, curses, and dreams. Its poems read like a story, taking the reader through a journey in which one overcomes a troubled past and experiences healing through the power of the arts and the beauty around us. It contains the Best of the Net-nominated poem "The Question."

Contender of Chaos explores the poetic life and exposition of the inner life of a woman with a visible disability: the experiences, challenges, and the people and places she has known and loved. It is a life not ordinary or compromised, but one of reflection and self-discovery. This chapbook is the author's first published collection. It includes poems written in the late 60's, but most have been written, or revised, in the past 10 years. Many refer to a love of nature and coming to terms with a world that is often inviting and yet, unwelcoming at the same time. The poet has always been fascinated by her observations of how people relate to her and to each other. The poems hint at the struggle to understand her own sexuality as a woman with a disability, that affects speech and coordination. Creating a world full of lively adventures, finding a life-long love and having a family of one's own, engaging in intellectual pursuits, and building a diverse group of friends and colleagues have challenged the assumptions and stereotypes that many have about people with physical disabilities.

Tiff Holland's "My Mother's Transvestites" is a bildingsroman in poems telling the story of an ungendered young woman and she comes to realize her identity through the relective lens (the tri-angled mirrors) of the cross-dressers which frequent her mother's beauty salon. These poems have appeared in celebrated literary journals and, "Hot Work" in prose form in the flash fiction chapbook "Betty Superman" which won the 5th Annual Rose Metal Press Award and was later reimagined as one of the novellas-in-flash in Rose Metal's "My Very End of the Universe" (with the title taken from one of Holland's poems) which went on to win an IPPY Award.

In the original Dutch, moordener is murder and kill is creek. In this powerful collection of poetry, we follow these dark waters through a remarkable series of landscapes - real and imaginary, past and present, personal and political - joined in this journey by a ragtag mix of characters from pop culture, literature and the visual arts, among them James McNeill Whistler, Dorothy Kilgallen, Ronnie Spector, and Simon of Cyrene. Conjuring "nests of stinging terrors / sequestered in clenched fists," these are poems for our precarious times, poems which believe we must look back to look forward - not for the sake of easy nostalgia, but to tell our stories truthfully: "manifest destiny, memoir, grand guignol."

The Universe You Swallowed Whole is a collection of poems that fly from the microcosm of ripples in a lake to the macrocosm of light bending in a black hole, from math to jazz, from informal to formal, from the here-and-now to the hereafter. This short book contains an infinite universe-one that you will long to return to again and again.

In this intimate collection of poems, Deborah Kahan Kolb invites the reader to join her ongoing journey of becoming, of reimagining a life in the years after leaving the insular Hasidic community of her childhood. The author's poems of birth and birthing, of the personal and political reinvention of the self, offer a glimpse of the ways one can - indeed must - transform and emerge constantly new, to allow trapped light to escape. At times reflecting on the deeply personal relationships of marriage and motherhood, at times invoking the collective memory of Jewish history, Escape of Light places the reader at the epicenter of one woman's evolving journey of self-discovery.This poetry collection is a winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO Award, and the poems "After Auschwitz" and "Re(vision)" have been adapted for the award-winning short film Write Me.

"A poet wants words" Dan Cullimore writes, . . . "to carry home . . . useful as nuts." In this, his first and only published collection of poems, Dan collects words and images made of the everyday materials around him-- clay, mud, rain, reflections, memories-and crafts them into poems that, like nuts, carry home both meaning and potential. A self-taught poet and life-long resident of Mid-Missouri, Columbia specifically, Dan draws on the natural seasonal rhythms of the American Midwest, paying attention to violets in spring, firelight under trees in the fall, the cold condensation of water on glass in winter, and the heft of Missouri mud after summer rain. These are poems to sit with. They reward careful reading with insight.Funded in part by FLP's One Last Word Program.

Winner of the Finishing Line Press 2019 Chapbook Competition, this sharply observant, powerful poetry collection explores the mysteries of connection and loss: the ways we co-exist, love, and leave.Leaping and swerving, Jody Winer's poems move across centuries and species: from an alligator farm lake to the moon's dry seas, from a stalled subway car to a 7-Eleven parking lot, from the garden of Eden to a burnt apple orchard.Welcome to guardian angel school: "Expect scant correlation between love and safety." The nation is haunted by "flickering strip malls and the Rust Belt's forlorn fortresses." We are expert at denial: "Though we know what's missing/our eyes still see complete trees. To live/we self-deceive." Grief "makes you write/your dead friend's name on the grocery list." What to do? These poems implore us to be curious, ask questions, pay attention. As any student should.Big answers are scarce, but small signs of hope abound. Light shines through dark times: "infrared visible ultraviolet X/raiser of spirits…. our daily bread sign of warm bed/and someone home." Death looms, but so does love: "As hours kill, chimes make fireworks." Imagination transforms: "There's still time./No end to invented light." So why not "Picture a Mount Rushmore for Women"?

The poems in Descent illuminate the lives of women (mythological, Biblical, historical, and modern) through traditional poetic forms, persona poems, and ekphrastic work. Whether reimagining the myth of Persephone and Demeter in the context of a modern mother-daughter relationship or giving voice to anonymous women portrayed in Impressionist paintings, these poems revise patriarchal stories from a decidedly feminist point of view. Woven throughout the collection are more personal poems connecting the poet's experience to that of the characters.

My Women, My Monsters, Janet Kozachek's lavishly illustrated poetry chapbook conjures monsters of the feminine kind for a post modern world. There are monsters who would be goddesses of power and grandeur if not for their mistaken identities. There are monsters who are quiet and others who are wild. Some are half insect, half human. Others sport chicken legs and lay eggs. Still others are enigmatic figures of the earth and skies. Many are archetypes of personalities, rendered as exotic yet familiar. Through poetry and art, Kozachek gives form and voice to fears, anger and awe that most everyone may recognize, regardless of gender. The author mines her rich history of studies and travels throughout Europe, the United States and Asia to bring home a treasury of both handsome and horrifying women - all in classic black and white linear designs with rich detailed patterns with a tapestry of words to match. These poems words and illustrations were created with an eye for detail, a mind for feminine complexities, and a heart for adventure. My Women, My Monsters, published by Finishing Line Press, previously won an Honorable Mention from Concrete Wolf for its witty verse completed and complimented by elaborately detailed black and white drawings. Exhibitions of the poetry and illustrations have been presented at the I.P. Stanback Museum of South Carolina State University with A Gaze Upon Woman: The Drawings of Janet Kozachek, and at Stormwater Studios in Columbia, South Carolina.

These poems are engaging, soulful and inspiring. Through a series of reunions, the poems provide snapshots of the author's journey from an Amish school to life in other countries. Additional portraits of various family members interest and amuse, while reflections on nature inspire gratitude for the good in our lives.

MERGING STAR HYPOTHESES, Mary K O'Melveny's first full-length poetry collection, takes readers on a ride through space, time, family dynamics, nature, science and politics. Award-winning poems include Travels To The Valley Of Lost Things (First Prize 2019 Slippery Elm Literary Journal Poetry Competition), Confessions of a Gazan Stargazer (Honorable Mention, 87th Writer's Digest Poetry Contest), The Sounds of Truth Vanishing (Short List, 2018 Fish Publishing Prize) and Kindness (Pushcart Prize nominee 2018). Reviewers have described the book as "a stunning debut" using "an orbit of words that swirl, shine and take us on an intergalactic journey." O'Melveny's "powerful voice" and her "blend of science and a hopeful heart, mixes with "rich imagery" as she explores "the wavelength between human curiosity and the stars, the coordinates of lovers, the collapsing and expanding family and the limits of distance and loss." The collection was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Washington Prize sponsored by The Word Works.

Dear River is separated into two sections: The South and Everywhere Else. The poems in the first section of the chapbook are written in an unhurried narrative format, while those in the latter half flow at a busier pace. Though separate, the two sections work together in an intricate interdependency. The poems explore the ideas of place, reconciling the past with the present, idealizing things that were, and the nuances of relationships. They recognize the imperfections of memory and the concomitant, haunting tendency of human nature to gloss over past occurrences. They attempt to create understanding and significance from such duality. The poems are at once familiar and unfamiliar, comforting and discomforting, thought-provoking yet surprisingly simple. Readers will develop a new appreciation for the landscapes and the ways of the South and Appalachia, and they will find warmth in the tenderness and honesty with which the poet addresses these ideas.

"There's another version of this story where I drain the past, rouge my cheeks with its blood, make a dead thing live," writes Jiordan Castle. She vividly details a life marked by her father's mental illness and incarceration. Even in the dark of the familial prison experience, Castle charms with a glowing mix of candor, compassion, and humor. This debut poetry chapbook takes us to the brink and delivers us back to ourselves-and to the familiar hope we all carry inside.

In his debut chapbook, Jacob Minasian tracks the often blatant inconsistencies he observes around him. Moving from California to Ohio just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, he records the startling social, political, and ecological transition from one environment to the next. Together, these poems construct the narrative of a journey, of a poet attempting to come to terms with the altered world around him, and to process the colossal shifts in the American collective.

A poem about choosing not to love. One about sorting through old photographs with parents. Another about navigating a difficult and intimate life choice. One about getting hit by a cyclist while crossing the street-"a small, mercurial moment and we are / eye to eye with our marrow, bodies owned / not by us but by the birth of the Universe". In her debut poetry collection This Strange Grace, Kelly Slivka invites us to share in the sharpness of her lived experiences, then employs them as portals through which we may enter into play with the enduring questions of existence. "It is important to remember what you cannot do," she writes in a poem about a magnolia bud she keeps on her desk. "You are surrounded by magics you cannot perform." Where do we belong, she prompts us to ask. Why are we here, and how do we go on? Integrating Slivka's background in ecology, her keen eye for the natural world, and her efforts to develop and understand her communal relationships, the poems in This Strange Grace do not shy away from the eternal terra incognita that is perhaps at the inscrutable heart of all art. Taken together, these poems render for the reader an instinctive and eager exploration of what it is to be alive-on a personal scale, on a global scale, and on the humbling scale of deep time.

Cracks in the Devil's Urn is a collection of contemporary fantasy poems about complex spirituality. Stoicism and nihilism are shown through love, music, lust, and falling from grace. Each poem is augmented with elements of the supernatural and teases a dogged optimism underneath. The language itself is marked by lyricism and sensibility. The encounters with Valkyrie, a Djinn, witches, and fallen angel rock stars create the fuller picture of the world around the central devil, Lucy. Lucy is bitter, but her self-love also overflows and touches those she tempts. The resulting poems speak less of what it means to be human, and more of what it means to be part of a broken world as a broken thing.