Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

Hearts Forged in Resistance is a book of poetry forged in resistance: resistance to the brutality of God, the brutality of men against women, the brutality of war. Resistance to death itself. And what are the weapons of this poetry? The weapons are many voices. Voices of memory and loyalty. Love. Imagination. Sex. The beauty of language. What is buried in the grave. What rises from the grave. These poems reach around the world from here to Mexico, from here to Ukraine, like a necklace of gems, reflecting the light of Courington's spirit.-Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After, New York State Poet Laureate 2018-2021

The Number 12 Looks Just Like You is an examination of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, their effects, & the traumas that cause them. Perkovich focuses on the strains caused by society that have left civilization with unhealthy coping mechanisms & responses to their traumas & how we can navigate & destigmatize them in ourselves & others.

Combining poems and drawings, war / torn is a meditation on the nature of war and our relationship to its devastation. Directly inspired by the tragic news and images from the war in Ukraine, this chapbook seeks to understand the trauma and loss that is faced by mothers, fathers, children, and grandmothers in a distant place that becomes personal through our shared human experience. This book argues that the role of the poet during times of war is to build empathy for all who suffer through the ratio between prayer & poetry.

Petit Morts: Meditations on Love and Death intertwines musings on the generative nature of love with a mourning of the finitude of the human body. It examines ways in which the dead dictate the emotional life of their survivors, and the manner in which life is reborn in a new form through interpersonal connection.. Spurred by musings on Freud's theories of Eros and Thanatos, psychiatrist Mukund Gnanadesikan takes the reader inside his own grief for loved ones and a dying universe, while offering hope of emotional regeneration in the form of basic human relatedness and empathy.

Not Guilty is Amatan Noor's unapologetic poetic endeavor for deliverance. Narratives of legacy, love, solitude, grief and displacement pulsate between origin stories and conjurings that revolt against despair. Trekking through cosmic intergenerational trauma and volatilities of land, Noor declares a reclamation of the body and the self. Poems spring from post-partition East Bengal, to a New Jersey Criminal Courthouse, to cascading cities across Europe and the Middle East where Noor collects soulful mementos and lessons on perseverance. This debut collection embraces one's inner turmoil while birthing stanzas as balms of convalescenceA striking tale of survivorship, migration, heartbreaks and joy with grit at its core. Not Guilty is a tenacious continuation of the self, past tragedies of catastrophic scope in unfamiliar terrains.

Miramont Park and Other Poems offers its readers a poetic vision into a small, local park in Fort Collins, Colorado during the changing seasons throughout the corona virus. A corona (no pun intended) of fourteen sonnets unmasks the fears and hopes of the park's daily visitors as they go about their everyday lives: young mothers, children in the playground, budding athletes, an Olympian jumper and elderly couples. The second half of this chapbook, A Slew of Sunday Sonnets, explores such topics as homelessness, celibacy, and a few essential feast days in the liturgical year. The book ends with a longer poem, a somewhat light-hearted look at the nature of writing, itself.

Midwest Musings features poems that are dedicated to where it all began for the poet-when a backyard felt like a world, where the thunderstorms ignited creativity, and how the trains seemed to call to each other in the middle of the night when they crossed her Midwestern city on their way to somewhere else. Midwest Musings is about the inspiration and the confusion of home, the roots that anchor, and the scattered thoughts on place and identity that escape definition. The poems in this chapbook find magic in the mundane, whether that be in recounting an old story or loving a creek or saving a luna moth. In the end, the poems come to a realization that no matter where you move, the regional roots of home run deep. They run so deep that they tangle in the soil of the self. The book also includes art (and cover art) by the Midwestern artist, Tina Browder.

Into A Salt Marsh Heart at first glance, appears to be a straightforward nature, or ecologically driven collection of poems, and it is to some extent. But it is also about the sudden loss of the author's father. The way she has arranged the work allows for that stark reality to dawn on you as a reader as you pass through the first few poems, and for you to experience both the sense of loss that such a sudden death brings, as well as touching on the complexities of family relationships. Before being gathered together to form this pamphlet, several of these poems have already been highly commended or short listed in poetry prizes and placed in competition anthologies, including The Gingko Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the Bridport Prize, others have appeared in literary journals including Agenda, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Broken Spine and The Poet's Republic.

In Dormant, Harriet Ribot's deeply honest first book of poetry, the reader is invited to share a writer's late life self-discovery. With children long ago raised and husband gone, Ribot doesn't over-romanticize her lived experience. "When your brain/has lain/dormant/what torment/to waken this thing" she tells us in the title poem. In another she writes, "Patience is time spread thin over peaks of frustration/and mounds of buried dreams, still visible/as one looks back over many years." A deep and playful affection for language lace together love, loss and painful awakening throughout this lovely book. -Roy Nathanson is author of Subway Moon, and teaches music at the NYU Gallatin School"I write to share" writes Harriet Ribot in her new book of poems, Dormant. Words tumble gently down the page. An occasional rhyme gives a boost. But the poems always land, gently, in the heart. Maybe, as "The Little Imp" says, "The whole world has a common bond of loneliness." Maybe, as in "The Net," There are "structures/holding us together in delicate balance." In this "keep-moving world" where we "drink from the fountain of kiss," Harriet reminds us that when you are on "the corner of somewhere to someplace else" that "life's what you choose-not what you've found." "Loosen up..." she urges, "live it up...show love to someone else!" Reader, follow the advice in these poems, and join with our Poet, saying "Having loved, I can face the future." -Bob Holman, activist, poet and filmmaker, is author of 17 volumes of poetry, most recently (Un)spoken and Life Poem, is founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and host of Language Matters

Any Closer to Home is a song of bewilderment, a body searching Earth for the beat beneath the turmoil so it can dance nevertheless. There's a jig for blistered fists, a naked waltz in a laundromat, and a blues lullaby for the end of the world. Migrants sweep the front stoop of Jupiter as mountainsides go up in flames. A donkey bellows, an apple falls, a bruise is swallowed. A long-distance driver pulls off the highway to kneel in a field of fireflies. She wants us to recognize the invitation. She wants us to consider the possibility that for all we know, she or any of us could be kneeling in the stars.

"We keep our animals locked / in pages." Through Illuminated Creatures, the award-winning chapbook and modern interpretation of a medieval bestiary, Angela Sucich explores personal and human experiences using the frame of animal lore, taking inspiration from but also interrogating the dubious stories and illustrations that brought the creatures to life in old manuscripts. Poems play with the structures and constraints of poetic forms, especially syllabic verse, as well as more thematic boundaries and the questions they raise. What is in our nature and what can change? Who do our bodies belong to? What is on the other side of loss? What stories are our lives telling us, and how do we write new ones? Especially when "[a] myth is a danger, too, kept warm and intact by the telling." Winner of the 2022 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize and the 2022 Cutbank Chapbook Contest.

The poems included in Tunnel address those narrowings, distant lights, and burials that complicate the paths to self-discovery through childbirth, exposure, and love. Ultimately, the poems seek beyond the underneath and the hidden to unearth glimmers, and like the final crow, joy.