Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

In her debut poetry chapbook Rusted Bells and Daisy Baskets, Andrea Panzeca takes readers on a wild ride through remembered and imagined landscapes across the Gulf South. Emerging as she does from its humidity, it's not surprising this poet moves as fluidly as she does between humor and tragedy.

Melora Walters's deceptively languorous poems jolt the senses like a rattlesnake tooth discovered in rumpled linen sheets. Her hypnotic lines wind tighter and tighter until you gasp, unaware you've been holding your breath as you read. ~Kim Ohanneson, Co-founder of The Whisky & Poetry Salon***Melora Walters is esteemed as an actor, artist, and screenwriter. As a poet, Walters draws from those influences to birth poems full of fresh insights and narratives. The poems in her brilliant new book Dear Mr. Brancusi give generous attention to poetry's artistry, and to the human condition. This collection is outstanding, and exceptional in its assurance. ~Leah Maines, Publisher, Finishing Line Press

In this collection of poetry, you are at the edge of experiencing the natural world in all its watery forms, with a definite whiff of salt air and a strong breeze that calls attention to the threats to our natural environment, expecially life in our warming oceans. Through stories and imagery, you will be reminded that memories are so often tied to the natural landscape, which, in the case of this poet, are set at the shoreline of her sensitivities, her aloha spirit and her poetic imagination.

In poems of narrative and lyric complexity PB Rippey weaves the daily concerns we all share - love, work, children, family, memory and personal history - into moments of quiet epiphany and redemption, into the realization that every moment is grace if we can see it. -Chris Abani, Sanctificum and Hands Washing Water***PB Rippey gazes beyond Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, collecting its history and hazy views into an elegance to be treasured through its tarnish. These poems are trail maps that lead beyond the Hollywood sign to reveal "California-a spine brown / as the air blurring scarred peaks." In the Valley, if a lover confesses his belief in past lives as a dolphin, sea turtle, or soldier, she opens "I like it. How can I / not?" That narrow space between mystery and lunacy, "this pocket of breathy Eden," teases discovery where "although / nothing is unfamiliar, we are shocked / to find it here..." The sprawl is a place of rose gardens and phlox, an urban ocean where Rippey writes, "I can't take my eyes off the sharks"-a place where the wild circles just beneath the surface. -Chryss Yost, most recently the author of Mouth and Fruit (Gunpowder Press, 2014)***This chapbook is a landscape of the earth and the heart, tracing geographical locations alongside intimate confessions. This is a Southern California book, a Valley book, a Los Angeles book, about the intersection between people and places, between light and despair, between now and what lies ahead. ~Millicent Borges Accardi, author of Only More So, Woman on a Shaky Bridge and Injuring Eternity

North of Zenith is about the cultural and physical landscape Lindy Obach grew up in: southwest North Dakota. These are poems about the farm, about family, about love, and about memory.

Colleen Anderson is a perfect example of authenticity in art. True excitement is triggered by a writer who sees each day as an energy source, and who knows what she came here to do. There's not a single lump under the lines of these sweet dynamic mechanisms about love, loss, nature, and family. Of course we know these are classic scenarios for poetry; but with Anderson the world is given new life. Each poem is a painting we enter, and when we leave we're made different by genuine experience. The quiet voice of Colleen Anderson, with its synoptic pruning of language, leaves us the spectacular hot star of authenticity. That's who she is. -Grace Cavalieri, poet, playwright, and host of The Poet and the Poem from the Library of CongressColleen Anderson's wonderful collection of poems, Bound Stone, will have something for everyone. From the tight, delightful lyric poems reminiscent of Kay Ryan to the longer narratives of the natural world akin to Maxine Kumin, Anderson fills her book, and our ears, with the musicality of waterfalls and pianos, birdsong, and human talk. We find sonnets and free verse, traditional and slant rhyme. The themes of love and loss, grief and joy, the comfort of friendship and the changing of seasons, both internal and external, echo through the poems. In "Canoeing in Fog," Anderson notes, "It was dark and bright at once." That's the way it is with these poems. But we're paddling through currents of language, not fog. -Anita Skeen, poet and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State UniversityColleen Anderson's poems are like spirit houses. With each poem Colleen invites us to enter and consider our place in the world. I say we because the poems are deeply communal and steeped in universal human love and loss. Beautifully crafted and grounded in sensory images-the osprey, the sky, the river, the cloud, the deer-we are buffeted by time, yes, but never lost or alone. Like the bound stone of the title poem I felt marked by water and salt. Read these lyric poems cover to cover and you will be spirited and etched by song. -Jane Vincent Taylor (janevincenttaylor.blogspot.com), author of Pencil Light

The poems in this book were written after the epitaph form used by the 3rd century B.C. poet, Heraclitus, for his collection of poems believed to be called Nightingales. Using the only known poem remaining of Heraclitus' work, "The soil is freshly dug," Glodek was moved to apply his ancient European form to a more modern and American context, that of slavery in the United States. This series of epitaphs are written in the voices of women who were slaves in the American South, and the name of the book, Birds of Mississippi, echoes the title of Heraclitus' collection.

Precision and mystery mingle and ripple through this beautiful collection of poems. As Julia Leverone paints landscapes, waterscapes and cityscapes in which human figures move darkly amid effects of light and space and time, to a meditative music, she brings you with her: "you are the one seeing," and you can say, with the poet, "I am changed." -Alicia Ostriker, author of The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog***"Shouldering," meaning "what is lifted up"-Julia Leverone's poems treat the serious weight of their themes with such clarity and ease it is as if the words themselves were transparent. That is to say, the poet's language never gets in the way of the reality of her material; the truth of her language takes us there immediately, without burden. -Stanley Plumly, author of Orphan Hours***There are some kinds of stillness so actively in motion that we can hear a strong, steady breathing in there at all times, deep at some cellular level-these poems by Julia Leverone have that, and they make me feel entrusted to some enterprise very large indeed: a wisdom available only in our truest perceptions of the world. They work hard, with subtle and precise intensity, but never seem to break a sweat. Their fresh, complex reckonings move me. -David Rivard, author of Standoff

Ghost of the Eye, by Roselyn Elliott, published by Finishing Line Press, is a collection of twenty-six lyrical poems that weave the paradox of uncertainty and loss with the "beauty and hope" contained in nature. With a discerning eye, powerful use of metaphor and vivid imagery, the poet's careful observations bring forward the expectation of survival and healing against a backdrop of natural forces and life's "dangerous realities." Elliott's careful examination of what we think we see and experience, and how we respond to our perceptions, in this, her fourth collection of poems, reassures that we will endure despite seemingly random obstacles and pain.

Alana Sherrill's Blood weeps with a sadness solid as a slave-song coming from a thicket, the message strong for what humanity never loses.  I mean the flame - it is here - precise, eloquent, powerfully rich in loving rages. ~Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate***The poems in Alana Sherrill's Blood are by and large poems of loss, but it would not be right to call them elegiac, or grieving. Poem after poem explores and enlarges upon Wallace Stevens' famous line in "Sunday Morning," "Death is the mother of beauty . . .." In the first poem "Cadaver," there is no miraculous sign of passage from the material to the spiritual, only the steady, true resuscitation of memory. These are poems of cycles and seasons, generations, commemorations, tributes. Sherrill's language, as in "He Might As Well Have Been David," is a beautiful mongrel, now technical and specialized, now loose and familiar and slangy, now artful and aesthetic, again, much like Stevens. From the gorgeous pantheistic lyricism of "Here After" to the intentionally quotidian prose of "Now," painfully aware of the imminent apocalyptic irruptions that lurk around every corner to "lacerate lives," Sherrill's grounded, steely-eyed faith that "we will stitch patch the place back together, but it won't be the same" endures. ~Jim Clark

"Deeply evocative, startlingly felt, the poems in Journey with the Ferry Man wink like sequins turning in light; they endear with their hard-won wisdom, their feminist bedrock. One reads in the poems a citizenship in language, in the inventive and organizing force with which these poems handle their materials, their contemporary and mythological sources. In the title poem, Vale promises two poems as payment to the ferry man to cross the threshold river. We can be grateful for the fifteen poems in this exciting collection. Each has the ability to map us to the other side; each poem is a lyric instruction for how to row." TYLER MEIER, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry CenterA unique perspective defines Whitney Vale's Journey with the Ferry Man and Other Poems. From the beginning where an ordinary clothes rack becomes "a fabric forest," these poems let us see the world differently. With wit, fresh images, and memorable phrasing, Vale gives us an oracular/ocular vision where "the wild comes forward."REBECCA SEIFERLE, author of Wild Tongue and Tucson Poet Laureate

"Small Fiasco" takes us on a poetry tour of several cities and the small things that happen in them. If her poems were potatoes they would be small fingerlings, yet despite their slight appearance Ferguson manages to root our longings in these places and place our longings in these roots. These lumpenpoems, these tubers, cling with the tenacity of the roots beneath all our gardens. Good luck getting rid of them.

Jane Shlensky nails it in her debut chapbook of narrative poems. This collection brims with moments of bliss and lives of hardship and pain. From birthing cows and the challenges of prom to hoarding broken things and the people who can't help breaking them, Barefoot on Gravel is ready to do battle for the hearts and minds of people everywhere. ~Robert Lee Brewer, editor of Poet's Market and author of Solving the World's Problems***Jane Shlensky's Barefoot on Gravel salutes the contrarieties of living memories as they have a way of coming back in beauty and love. These narrative poems attest to the imagination's singing sway to help the poet and her readers live full lives. ~Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate ***One of Jane Shlensky's characters in her poem "Simple Directions" provides directions according to where things used to be. By use of memory and narrative, Shlensky does the same throughout this remarkable collection, making clear "how to shoulder memory, stand, and walk"; how to "toughen our hearts"; how to "listen"; how to "be sure of foot and balanced in a world that's not"; how to "see damages as paths to understanding"; how to "survive what we know"; and perhaps most importantly, how to "sound good enough to make you smile." ~Scott Owens, author of Thinking About the Next Big Bang in the Galaxy at the Edge of Town

Mary Catherine Harper's Some Gods Don't Need Saints, a poetry collection concerned with human conceptions of divinity, gives voice to speakers who re-imagine humanity/divinity relationships in Biblical stories (e.g. Job, Esau and Jacob, Ruth and Naomi, Adam and Eve), the Keresan mythology of Grandmother Spider, and other myths and legends. This collection has been described by Howard McCord, author of The Man Who Walked to the Moon and recipient of the Nancy Dasher Book Award and NEA Fellowship, as "a brilliant and moving book honoring the old gods, who, if forgotten by most and seldom nourished by an invocation or an honorific nod, still attend all our doings carefully. They are eternally patient with the errors humans make trying to understand the spider's track, or the heft of a stone face held in a wondering hand."

Balzac's Robe and Other Poems is a chapbook whose poems are both humorous and serious. They take a careful look at a hawk on the western California coastline, at a "clean room," at love and loss, at a ribald dinner party, and other quirky encounters. These poems are a selected from the poems Marello wrote over a span of twenty-five years, from the 1990s to the present.

In Go Ask Alice, Liz Axelrod invites us to view the world through the looking glass prism of her thoroughly postmodern imagination. Ironically, though, instead of distortions, we enjoy sharp observations that capture our contemporary landscape with an irreverent and dark, celebratory wit. This collection offers a panoply of our common obsessions-food, sex, politics, technology-showing how they impinge upon and transform our many identities. As passionate as "full moon fever," yet delicate as "hand-colored sound-bytes," these poems create a wonderland of extravagant delights well worth exploring. ~ Elaine Equi *** "The sky's the limit," writes Liz Axelrod, "if you've got good aim." She does. With Lewis Carroll's Alice as a guide through a terrain of lived experience, Axelrod shoots the shit out of the clown circus that is life itself-and never misses. A single page has healing powers (and not only when watching Netflix). Meanwhile, Axelrod's Saturn births the hexagon cloud that brings our matter home, home to these very healing pages. ~ Sharon Mesmer

"I want to build / layers of language - / bind the thought threads / that otherwise fray and tear. / The words on this page / long to last," writes the narrator in the poem "Mistakes," in Merna Skinner's skillful and thrilling poetry debut.  Palimpsest-like meanings build steadily through this book which travels to a range of settings and through pivotal moments in personal history. Skinner looks through a prismatic lens to explore both literal place in the world - Paris, New York, Spain - and displacement, as in the poem "Southern Bound White Girl" as her poems puzzle through legacies and what it means to belong. Skinner's voice takes the reader through deftly observed landscapes, often undercut with a poignant undertow, and at other moments, joyous wordplay, deliciously unexpected rhyme, and sheer delight in discovery through language. Skinner has found her home in words, and the reader is richer for visiting these many-hued rooms, both hidden within and deeply welcoming.-Elline Lipkin,author of The Errant Thread***A Brief History of Two Aprons is honest, engaging and demonstrates the past can be a place troubled with questions. Skinner asks us "...to describe the sound of a turning page?" as we turn page after page of beautiful poetry we find ourselves drifting through her life, and in doing so discover something about our own. These poems "... traveling slow as heat ..." deserve to be read.-Rick Bursky, author, I'm No Longer Troubled By the Extravagance

Coconut Palm Kind of Woman by Nimi Finnigan is a chapbook of poems which explores identity and place. As the poems travel across different landscapes, the island of Haiti and American territories such as Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and West Texas, multiple identities emerge - mother, lover, granddaughter, exile, immigrant - and intimately engage with the different environments. It's a collection of poems about life, about moments of intimacy and isolation with Haiti and its rich history always in the background.

Limited Engagement is Joanne Greenway's first published chapbook of free verse poetry. The subject matter of these poems is wide-ranging and her style is direct and accessible. The choice of a theatrical title was deliberate: we are hardly ever in control of our life script. An unexpected deal of the cards can happen to anyone. We "actors" grace the stage but once, for a limited engagement.

"To read Christina Quintana's work is to be filled with clarity in the blur and din of our cities, when having 'nothing to mourn' is an 'excuse for an adventure.' Each poem is 'a reminder, an urging' to find in others, in our words and in ourselves, a 'want for something' and what the heart wants." -Ricardo Maldonado, poet and translator "In open-hearted, honest verse, Christina Quintana's The Heart Wants gives and gives until our hearts break and break open. A vibrant debut full of verve and charm."-Thomas Dooley, author of Trespass and artistic director of Emotive Fruition

Now is a collection of poems about coping with the death of a spouse of 24 years who suffered more than a decade with debilitating illness. Through these poems you get a glimpse of what it was like for the poet to break from the routine of care-giving that first summer as a widow. But instead of despair, you feel the resilience of this survivor who searches for a way to keep going. Now takes you on a journey of sorrow and hope.

Sharon Scholl's articulation of various stage of life-childhood, adolescence, and maturity-are rendered with a painter's attention to detail. The poems in Summer's Child don't shy away from the harsh facts of aging; on the contrary, they welcome in an artful decrepitude with spirited irony, all for the sake of an acute awareness of the present moment: "...it is enough to be/...possessed by this space/this world flowing through me" (from Ocala Forest). The unique range and depth of Scholl's unswerving observations will both surprise and liberate the reader. -Judith SkillmanSummer's Child, by Sharon Scholl, brings us bright, terse, often emotionally charged reflections on youth and aging through the eyes of one returning to scenes of childhood. She conjures up past landmarks, family, and places that have all but disappeared except for what lives, moves, and breathes in the chambers of her mind. Through her sensitivity, intense focus, fresh, often startling imagery, and subtle humor she brings them to life and blows the dust off forgotten memories-"the haze of family voices/stuck forever to the wall." This force of memory together with her strength of language give us a collection of poems that will help us dust off the voices that have stuck to the walls of our own mental chambers. A memorable work. -Bonny Barry Sanders

Oil Slick Dreams explores intersections of hope and imagination, focusing in on conversations that mingle personal identity with questions regarding issues such as war, domestic abuse, environmental destruction, and empowerment. Including award-winning poems and a sixteen-poem sequence that reflects upon cycles of domestic abuse, the collection explores both realistic and surreal territory, often returning to the power of the individual, and to the power of vision.

Ruth Ann Allaire, deftly captures the season's capacity to evoke emotions from despair to hope. Winter is a lot more than just snow and cold temperatures. It's also a time to reflect the passage of time. In this wonderful collection of poems, Allaire laments missed opportunities and yearns for connection. But there is also humor. Readers will surely find a comparison to a squabble among birds with that of their human counterparts to strike an amusing chord. Winter in a River Beach Town, is a terrific anthology any poetry fan would enjoy adding to their collection. -Cathy Carter, Delaware Public Media and self-proclaimed expert arbiter of stuff you should know aboutRuth Ann Allaire's portrayal of the beauty fall brings gently guides the reader into the harsh realities of winter, capturing the essence of introspection that only wintertime can bring. Her charming depiction of nature evokes a sense of seeing peace and tranquility with an undercurrent of feeling, that is quite the opposite. She possesses a unique way of tugging at our heartstrings; sharing with time felt hunger, life's lessons with such clarity that can only strengthen one's resolve. A must read, in my humble opinion. -Teresa Mohme, author of Nature Speaks Volume To Those Who... and A daughter's Reflection on the Suicide of Her FatherRuth Ann Allaire's Winter in a River Beach Town illuminates the seasons of the year in a voice ripe with wisdom and reveals a life spent in keen observation and persistent hope. Using fresh images of nature, she shares a perspective of realism about human relationships in spare poems which speak volumes to her readers. The sound and rhythmic cadence of Time and Testament, just for example, provide music for a hypnotic dance in celebration of the eternal resilience of our flawed humanity. She sets in sharp relief our breath-taking, ever-changing world with the space separating us from the people we love. This is a lovely, haunting first book of poems. -Elizabeth W. Seaver, poet and artist at Water Street Studio

House of Women is where the inner lives of the women you love dwell. Kristin Kovacic's poems let you peer inside to honest female experiences in its many forms--lover, mother, daughter, artist, teacher, wife. New Women's Voices Series, No. 119

Sarah Sala's collection is full of sly and beautiful poems. Startling and exploratory, her voice is completely unique, and her vision blazes in every line. This is important new poetry by a poet of genuine talent. -Laura Kasischke THE GHOST ASSEMBLY LINE does a lot in just a few poems. I love how present the past is in this collection - family history, a city's history, and the small painful moments from a life are celebrated alongside quotidian concerns, or a lover's body. Intimate and public spaces fill this collection and the effect is dizzying in the best way. It reminds us that poems are the place where everything happens at once. -Matthew Rohrer Sarah Sala's work goes beyond our everyday use of a word like catharsis to its older definition, a purgation. It is urgent, and yet, in the many faces of violation here, there is a voice that wants to make us safe, and it does this by presenting America with its own broken surface. These poems burst from the seed of Yeats's terrible beauty. They brandish themselves on blank space, praise what negation does to desire, and shiver gorgeously with rare kindness. In their gleam, we see splendor, outrage, and "a torrential downpour into nothingness. -Natalie Eilbert

"Gina Forberg's new book, Leaving Normal invites us into a microcosmic world delving deep into her role not only as a daughter to her dying mother but also as a mother raising a son with special needs. Through driving narrative and lyricism she asks us to bear witness to the difficult, the unspoken and fear surrounding these events. In the poem Leaving Normal, she speaks to us with an honest, no holds barred voice: When my son says, "fuck" instead of "truck," "weed" instead of "read," I am grateful for the sounds he makes, for the missed chords, for the imperfection of song. This honesty and authenticity is pervasive throughout the book. When she can hardly bare another moment of her mother's suffering she admits in Bedtime Story: When her breathing became labored / I was grateful / for the thunder of the subway, passing, // silencing her body. All night I lay there / and when I heard / the rails rattle, I wanted one train // then another. Leaving Normal is a book of unparalleled compassion, devotion and love. It is Gina Forberg at her most revelatory, vulnerable self.

That the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson have influenced this collection of poems is not in question. These urgent poems largely mirror the realities of patterns found in the natural world, while at the same time reflecting the value of self-reliance, as well as the transcendent values of inculcation and becoming, of being interrelated and alive in the seasons of one's world. These are poems of the spiritual path critically intersecting the natural world, poems that indicate how desperately at times one must seek individual and creative pathways to a synthesis of spiritual and natural truths.

Running Away by Rebecca Guess Cantor follows a woman's journey from childhood into adult life through a wide span of emotions and in a variety of forms including sonnets, couplets, and a pantoum.