Bøger udgivet af Finishing Line Press

Judith Terzi's Now, Somehow perfectly captures the Proustian moment-a carefully calibrated record of the backwards look. In the very first poem, she imagines her oncologist cutting into her colon as a way to question what remains, what's left behind in this rearrangement of organs: "No memory of all the little madeleines / and Sunday's flow of hours. Slippery / fingertips straining to hold onto a waltz." The focus on recovering the body also includes the Covid pandemic, as the final words of the book lament "putting on a little black dress to go nowhere" when what she really longs for is to "Put on yesterday's refrains." It is no accident that Terzi's last word is "refrains," the repeated lines of songs, for it is this impulse to sing again-to re-verse-that is at the heart of this astonishing collection.-Linda Dove, author of Fearn, This Too, O Dear Deer, and In Defense of ObjectsNow, somehow, in the times of Covid, aging, failing marriages, cancer, isolation, and always the memory of more innocent, hopeful times, in the midst of life, real life-we are going to put on our little black dress, favorite necktie, and we are going to go dancing. Now, Somehow, a chapbook of poetry by Judith Terzi-poems of skill, tough lyricism, humor, and solace, the solace of poems beautifully wrought.-Richard Garcia, author of The Chair, The Other Odyssey, and The Persistence of ObjectsJudith Terzi speaks in tongues and trusts her readers to look up a thing or two. She reminds us that frailty and the limits of medicine plop us down in the middle of life, even as they pluck us up from our lives. She knows that her days are under threat, and that no one else can tell her story. I give her especial props for using the repetitions of form to enact the accumulation of being overwhelmed that illness brings, and, in so doing, to go meta on us. She gives us a furnished world where every tchotchke has a story to tell, and where inner life and outer events hold conversations. Welcome to a full place.-Karen Greenbaum-Maya, author of Kafka's Cat and The Book of Knots and Their Untying

Thomas Fucaloro is a bottle in lightning-a typo that's better than the correction-a gentle soul raging like thunderous ocean. Whether spoken on stage or off page, Fucaloro's poems sound and read like a poetic Piano Man; they commiserate with those drinking loneliness and provide sobering truths on celebrating our lives in all the humanity and humannes we can muster. Thomas writes like a man possessed with purpose, like a dainty 18th century alchemist consumed with creating works of gold worthy of the finest broken Japanese teacup.-M. A. Dennis, Host & Curator of the National Writers Union Reading SeriesFucaloro is his own gravitational force, comprised of vulnerability, earnestness, and humor. Like Rumi, his poems are easy on the eyes with a simplicity that is sneakily complex. You can't help but cry and laugh and learn about yourself and the poet.-Advocate of WordzIs a salad without croutons a salad worth eating? In his book The Only Gardening I Do Is When I Give Up Fucaloro has written a series of tornadoes and inside those tornadoes are croutons and when I say croutons I mean a violin playing hippo, a way out through a stuffed elephant, a receding ocean, a plate of pasta, a pulsing mother, all things expansive. Open your mouth and take a bite, crunch your way through these meaty poems, I promise you won't want to stop for water.-Vanessa Chica Ferreira

Chicago poet Albert DeGenova brings his formidable strengths as a writer and jazz saxophonist to Mama's Blues, a chronicle of his mother's losing battle with Alzheimer's disease. The familiar emotions-love, grief, confusion, denial-are here, filtered through the unique DeGenova sensibility that transcends the cliches and cuts right to the heart. For anyone who has loved and lost a parent, particularly one who has suffered through dementia, this collection will bring insight, connection, and perhaps a degree of solace.-P. Hertel, co-editor of After Hours: A Journal of Chicago Writing and ArtThe poems of Mama's Blues by Albert DeGenova ache with love, tenderness and remembrance when one's first love's own memory is fading. With direct language and poignant imagery, DeGenova offers up poems as songs to match his mother's hymnal voice. If the blues are indeed passed down from mother to son, then it's a good inheritance, a good inheritance. This book is a gift like a drink of water for a thirsty reader.-Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the CrownAlbert DeGenova's Mama's Blues is an ever-ripening suite of laments, heartfelt and musical. His poems remind us that mortality, memory, and passing time are sweet tricksters. They flimflam us into believing we see our mothers diminishing, disappearing, yet through these poems we understand a mother's legacy is always latent and forever unplumbed.-Kathleen Driskell, author of Blue Etiquette

I wouldn't be surprised if I found that "Michael Darcher" is the pen name of one of my favorite comics. Through leaps and sidesteps and sidelong glances, these deeply funny and moving poems make me laugh and then wince and often leave me in an epiphanic moment as if I were lying in a hammock at someone's farm in Minnesota. If you love Lucia Perillo, Ron Koertge, and Billy Collins, you'll love this Michael Darcher fellow.-DEREK SHEFFIELD, poetry editor of Terrain.org and author of Not for LuckMichael Darcher's collection, Odd Comfort, is a book of mature poems about a life lived fully. Darcher illustrates for us how the love we carry for our family holds us steady and can also traumatize us. There is a deft touch in the imagery and music in these poems. And after reading them, we remember even those we have forgotten and are thankful for the odd comfort that they have been in our lives.-JEFF KNORR, author of Color of a New Country

It's high time more got to enjoy and celebrate the poetry of Broderick Eaton and, with the publication of black bird blue, that time is here. This emerging poet is one to pay attention to. Creating intimacy with the reader through unique imagery drawn from her close scrutiny of the natural world, she takes risks not only in the phrasing and formatting of her poems, but also in her carefully embroidered approach to the expression of love and loss.-Ellen Waterston, author of Walking the High Desert and Hotel Domilocos

What We Do with Our Hands chronicles a five-week period in the speaker's life during which she buries her mother, finds herself unexpectedly headed for divorce following a long marriage, and is kicked out of her home. The poems reflect a life racing out of control in real time, and the hard-fought journey to regain some sense of order. Many of the poems in this collection are in response to, or in conversation with suffering, and coming to terms with shame, anxiety, denial-and the initial failure to live the life the speaker wanted. What We Do with Our Hands is a tangible place where suffering can coexist with the almost unendurable beauty that is life.

Falling Bodies, a chapbook of poems from Finishing Line Press, explores loss, identity, and family through the lens of the natural world. The book, part of Finishing Line's acclaimed Chapbook Series, is by Finger Lakes area author, Jillian Barnet, whose poems speak to universal issues, but are born of the author's particular experience as an adoptee, mother, and lover in he landscape of her former home in Western Pennsylvania.From the self as a Roman ruin to God as a big-handed homeboy, from Copernican systems to the doubt and lust of Darwin's wife, the poet's imagination is as far-reaching as her gaze is unflinching. The poems "shudder, dither / in the risen wind against savage blue." Using sensuous images of the natural world, the poet explores "the portage of grief," "the coming / to pass of the past, its inevitable laying hold."Barnet's poetry has appeared in North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Image, and elsewhere. Her poem, "Egg," which is featured in Falling Bodies, was nominated by Bellingham Review for a Pushcart Prize.

Fukushima Dreams goes to the heart of the March 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan and expresses people's bewilderment, loss, and sorrow. By sharing their feelings, however, people rediscover faith, joy, and the power of the imagination.

Infused with images of the natural world, Sheltered in Place is a braid of three poetic sequences. The first focuses on a grown child's relationship with an aging parent living in a memory ward; the second focuses on a parent marking the growth of a child from her birth through her teen years; the third sequence, which gives the collection its title, examines life in the early days of the pandemic when shutdowns were imposed in the US. Including traditional and prose poems, the collection has been praised for its vivid descriptions and its explorations of memory and faith.

The Open Hand of Sky examines personal bonds and the forces that break them. Divided in three parts, this intimate full-length collection by Connie Wasem Scott explores a sibling bond and shared memories lost to an illness; a marriage that dries up like desert rain and the child that sprang from the turmoil; the speaker's longing for connection that grows from loneliness and grief. Landscapes roll through this collection like a road trip through Colorado fields, North Dakota farmlands, the craggy hide of West Texas, to the towering trees of Washington. In each place, the speaker keeps an eye trained on the natural world - her source of comfort and stability, as though nature's hand will hold her steady against the blowing gales of time and loss.

In Tony Luebbermann's poems, terrors flash as unexpectedly as storms. The gorgeous, perfectly balanced, flora and fauna of the American Southwest contrast with the off-kilter actions of human beings. Because of our stupidity and greed, "the dawn that could and should adorn us" might not come.-Natasha Sajé, Professor of English, Westminster College, and Writing faculty, Vermont College Fine ArtsTony Luebbermann's poems are beautifully attuned to the landscapes of his heart-the southwest desert and northern lakes. In this work language rises from dinosaur track, water, stone, city street, and ancient ruin. These poems sing of time's dance with timelessness-how our grievous mortality is sheltered within Nature's continuance.-Alison Hawthorne Deming, Regents Professor of Creative Writing, University of Arizona, New Work: A WOVEN WORLD: On Fashion, Fisherman, & the Sardine DressIn Three Doors, One Room, I am transported by Tony Luebbermann's crystalline images, forged from keen observation and an adventurous imagination. With fidelity to the lyric tradition, these poems weave love and death into a tapestry we recognize as our world-night rose, butterfly on the city of a flower, cactus moon. Consistent and veritable throughout, despite the range of subjects, is a voice, kind, honest and wise, a voice I am honored to listen to.-Christopher Nelson, author of Blood Aria and editor of Under a Warm Green Linden

When she packed for six weeks in Eastern Europe on a Fulbright-Hays Grant, Victoria Garton hoped to bring openness and wonder to the adventure. She also packed for the hills and valleys of an introvert's terrain. Details in this chapbook of poems show life in Hungary and Poland less than a decade after the fall of the U.S.S.R. We see the crumbling facades, the graffiti-covered walls, but also the cottages sprouted like mushrooms after rain. The delight of seeing a Madonna wearing Tangerine Tango lipstick, the shock of a robbery, stirred cold war memories, and home-sickness that comes on viewing wind-swirled wheat are all part of this deeply observed journey.

The first poem here portrays the capacious mindfulness and vision of Georgia O'Keefe on a meditative walk in the desert as she gathers materials from near and far, at her feet and beyond the horizon, for another of her famous works of quiet comfort or fiery instigation, and it is that same spirit and method that Jo Kennedy brings to her own artful, awakened work, guiding us "into memory / of what we lose in the world, / then find again in hill and bone and sky." This collection features that integral balance between mortality and rebirth, the grave and the flower that adorns it, an unending cycle of losing and finding-the centering, profound understanding which once animated the poetry of Keats and Coleridge, yet is as fresh as today's sunset and dawn, memory and dream. Lost in wandering or in isolation, we'll want to take the enticing offer in these poems, the fire on the mountains "beckoning us on, / calling us back."-Gregory Donovan, author of Torn from the Sun and Calling His Children HomeWith a lyricism contained in powerful, compact lines, Jo Kennedy takes us to "...a white space between earth and sky/ where even the ice is lovely in its treachery...". These poems reach beyond the literal to a spiritual place where one can enter grace even when "...lost in your own geography/...where oceans and rivers,/earth and sky scatter/into bedrock and dream... Kennedy offers hope and empathy for the universal struggle of facing loss and moving forward. "Lean in to loss..." the speaker says in "The Summer of Our Isolation, "...barter hard for life...lean in, lean in."-Roselyn Elliott, author of Ghost of the Eye and The Separation of Kin

Farouk Goweda's poems as translated from the Arabic by Walid Abdallah and Andy Fogle give us an open and bleeding Earth, a world and a language begging to be healed, and by each of us. Goweda's poems don't get mixed up in nostalgia but yearn for something better than some heady version of the past. What I am struck with, reading these poems now, is how urgent these translations are: but the tools to repair are in all of our hands. The cultural and ecological merge as we encounter a language that is a plea, an outcry, a call to life across borders and difference.-Allison Grimaldi Donahue, translator of Carla Lonzi's Self-portrait

Tom Laughlin takes us outdoors in poetry that brims with the natural elements-we are immersed in New England landscapes with a town green, a mistress moon, snowy woods lined with elfin ski tracks, and swimmable water in every form, which conjures joy and jazz, a Great White, and a night-time pipe-smoking fisherman. Haunting the collection, like a familiar ache, is a wounded and wounding father. Death and tragedy slip in around tender stories of swimming a grasshopper to safety, climbing pencil pines, and James Wright's hammock. Laughlin's collection invites us to"[bob] in a universe of stars" as we ponder 'the rest of the way.'--Mary Buchinger, author of e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling and president of the New England Poetry Club

This collection brings with it a lot of introspection, encouraging speculation in the small details around us; Perhaps, this work seems to say, it is important to take in the world around us whilte we gather our scattered thoughts. Perhaps this grounds us, so that we do not lose ourself to the fog of existentialism whilst trying to do the dishes. Thought-provoking and often very visceral. A valuable read for those who like to reflect on daily life.-Angelica Fyfe, editor at Luna Station Quarterly, administrator of the Chronic Pain CommunityHeavy Little Things is a deftly written collection of observations from within family life that weaves a rich tapestry from the complex details of domesticity. Shana Ross handles parenthood, grief, and love with a keen eye and sensitivity that makes each line resonate with deep connection.-Jennifer Lyn Parsons, Founder and Editor of Luna Station Quarterly and author of Take On MeIn Heavy Little Things, Shana Ross brings us to "the place in our lives where our ghosts have names" and our children strip unabashedly in the yard. At once poet and philosopher, Ross sciences us into "moving parts/magic lanterns" as she asks our bodies to consider what it was to collect ice in the early morning dark-what it might be-to strain like basement rhubarb: breaking, but always toward the light.-Sherre Vernon, author of Green Ink Wings and The Name is Perilous

Reading through Mike Matthews' collection, Ashes, I'm reminded of the central figure in Eliot's The Waste Land, who says of the crowd crossing London Bridge, "I had not thought death had undone so many." For the citizens that populate Matthews' poems, the line between existence and non-existence blurs, and they, too, are undone by an emptiness they cannot name as their "hours bleed away." Matthews' central narrative voice wanders these spaces as well, navigating his way as witness to the suffering of these figures, while seeking his own understanding of mortality, reconciling expectation and loss, and bracing for a future where only sand and ash remain.-Brian Cordell, author of the book, In Their Final PerformanceIf life had a book of Cliff's Notes, it might read something like Mike Matthews' Ashes. You'd be left just as perplexed, after reading it, but a door of understanding would have cracked open, and you'd feel less alone. "I have left notes on the kitchen counter for me to find," Matthews writes, but in these we find notes for us too. Ashes invites the reader into the soul of the poet, to unique and powerful places that are both specific and universal. Matthews tells us, "that I am on a paper road / that yellows at night and burns / on the edges of a day." And somehow in doing so, in showing us this truth, also sets us free.-Jenny Jaeckel, Author of House of Rougeaux, and Boy, FallingAshes arrests the reader in mid-stride. Stop everything, it seems to say, and listen and look and fill your lungs with infinity of being and not being, here and gone, cast off and retrieved, broken and mended. It is a work that pins ordinary moments and unflinchingly precise imagery in the same frame and asks us to hold them together in our consciousness for a long, transformative moment before they too become ashes, before we move on to our next breaths, our next steps, the next fiery item on life's to-do list. It is at once meditative and passionate-a work of catch and release in the most beautiful of ways.-Kristy Peloquin, author of Adrift: A Collection of Poems

Metaphorest is a neologism created by Martin Settle the author of this work by the same name. It is the synthesis of words metaphor and forest. The themes of The Metaphorest fit into many of the new words and terms that are becoming salient in these times - Symbiocene, Wood Wide Web, Anthropocene, Grammar of Animacy, Mutualism, and Mycorrhizal Networks. Settle believes we cannot express ourselves adequately without the metaphorical values of nature. We become less than human and linguistically impoverished, if we cannot as he does, use: jewelweed as a metaphor for desire, giant puffballs for the beginnings of thought, moss as existential survival, bees as Trappist monks, and peepers as the poet's goal. The last poem of this collection is an overview of all the masks of nature that Mr. Settle has tried on in order to be able to write The Metaphorest.

In Maps To the Vanishing, Nate Maxson is the cartographer who guides us through the labyrinthine nature of our impermanent existence. In these poems, we lose ourselves within the shifting geographies of memory and history. Under "the shadow of the sound and the shadow of the weight," Maxson asks us to peep the comet and listen for the echo over the remnants of all the landscapes in this universe. From Caravaggio to imperialism, physics to Stradivari, Mars to Maxson's own past, he pushes us to consider "what we might be willing to burn if it meant we could remember."-James Croal Jackson, author of Our Past Leaves"This is the way," Nate Maxson intones, "Come inside." A perfect introduction to another beautifully composed, versatile collection of poems. Maps to the Vanishing is the struggle between hope and terminal cynicism that every single one of us needs to read right now. I'm begging you to read one of the best poetry collections you're going to find in 2021.-Gabriel Ricard, author of The Oddities on Saturday Night and Clouds of Hungry DogsSome of the most uniquely threaded and captivating verse you'll find today. Language is cool again and if you don't think so look behind you, Language is gonna sort you out.-Barracuda Guarisco, author of Uncomfortable Music and EIC of @rlysrslit