Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

In What You Wish For, Ruth Bardon uses a feminist lens to take a fresh look at wishes, witches, magic spells, princesses, sleeping beauties, and 21st century queen bees. Her poems are sympathetic both to hopeful, yearning heroines and to equally hopeful, yearning villains and minor characters. At the same time, they are darkly pessimistic about the possibility of happy endings. With subtlety and humor, these quiet poems radically deconstruct familiar stories.

Good Work for Small Hands is a collection of poems about childhood spaces - those found in the yard, the home and the heart. The poems follow the wanderings of a little in her Missouri backyard during the 1970s. Whether lying under a fluffy pink mimosa tree, picking dandelions for her mama or fending off the advances of a neighbor in his shed, our narrator navigates all of her longing and confusion while remaining full of hope and wonder.

The Sight of Invisible Longing explores the shattering and remaking of identity following the end of a long marriage. If a woman is no longer wife or primary caretaker of her children, who is she and where does she belong in this world? Her dreams of flight share both a sense of the untethered and a desire to live free of traditional roles and expectations. In these linked poems and collages, Braden exposes the raw wound of her grief, recognizing that imperfection is the bread of fellowship, and invites the reader on her journey to reconcile her past through rediscovering her sensuality, reclaiming her voice and recovering her spiritual connection.

Lee Landau's poetry is deeply accessible as she writes with raw honesty about her personal landscape: her relationships with family, their dysfunctional backstories, and the many phases of loss and grief that tumble through her life and poems. There is an inherent glow to her precise language and images that charm the reader. Many of the poems in this Chapbook underscore feelings of anxiety. Landau opens up her life and times in these thirty poems. She has been a finalist in four poetry contests, her work has been well published in journals and small presses. This is not the writings of an emerging poet, but the result of how she explores a well honed craft while engaging in poetic themes of love, loss, grief. Known influences on her poetry are Mark Strand, Tom Lux, Sharon Olds and Maxine Kumin. Knotted should capture a broad based audience from 18 to 99 years old, a Highly Recommended Read.

Christine's is a new and generous voice. In The Bronx Years, she recalls her rebellion growing up in a traditional, Italian-American family in the Bronx, New York. The poems examine her relatives - with humor and honesty - and ask, what do we choose to inherit?The poem at the heart of the collection, The Truth About Skating, won Honorable Mention for the Allen Ginsburg Award. Her work appears in The Paterson Literary Review, Voices in Italian-Americana, and in the anthology, Rumors, Secrets & Lies.The Bronx Years is filled with vitalità, writes Nathalie Handal (Life in a Country Album, the Republics). This collection poses fundamental questions about the immigrant experience: What are ancestors? Who are we meant to become?The Bronx Years is the quintessential American story, writes Matthew Lippman (Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful). Christine is a master poet of the heart and the head, of the street and the wide-open spaces of family, love and hope.

LIFE, DEATH, LOVE, and BABIES is a roadside monument to the totality of life. Spanning roughly ten years of David Brehmer's life, this prismatic collection casts a meditative gaze on everything from trauma to gun violence to parenthood to music to time itself, offering moments large and small an equal share of the spotlight. It is a celebration, an investigation, a memorial sketched with curiosity and concision.Rob Lipton, former poet laureate, says, "David Brehmer loves life, the full-blooded travesty...disappointment, loss, love, but embracing it, ecstatically celebrating the everythingness of existence." And Quan Barry, award-winning author and UW poetry professor, remarks, "Life, Death, Love, and Babies reminds us of the wonder that is our birthright if we would only pay attention."It is a collection alternately riotous and reverent, but all told with a reflective eye, a patient heart, and unflinching honesty.

Terence Degnan is the real thing-a streetwise philosopher whose poems ring with music, rough wisdom, and wry humor. They don't "guardrail" or snowflake with us;" and there's "no need to doctorate around." The speaker here-"born with eyes too wide/ sworn to an Irish secrecy"-is both emphatic and questioning, professing to "regret almost everyone," while asserting "in me is born a great empathy." Indeed. Degnan strikes such a fine balance between grit and grace, it kind of hurts. It's the good kind of hurt you should run out and read.-Tina Cane, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, author of Body of Work and Year of The Murder HornetTerence Degnan's poems are flush with what the world could use a bit more of right now-laughter, joy, honesty, vulnerability. When directed at their audience's inner child, these poems sing with intent. They will hold you, laugh with you, and ultimately lead you towards imagining a better world. Keep them close. -Denne Michele Norris, Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature

GETTING TO HEAVEN (AND OTHER MIRACLES) provides a humorous and provocative exploration of spiritual issues with poems rich in creative imagery. The poet gently uncovers the profound in common experiences such as a getting a pet, a medical procedure, relying on a GPS, and the joy of a long awaited pregnancy.

INVASIVES is a dark daydream in a small Midwestern town: a place of hunger, dizzying narcotics, and dormant lies in children's minds. Here, a coming-of-age story emerges in delectable scenes, words that open and close like petals, and images that knife as easily as if through stems. INVASIVES conjures familiar dangers, then slices them open and enchants them. It softens into myth a love that refuses to disappear.

Judy Garland is Not a Sunrise explores the passions and perils of artistic life, examining addiction, self-destruction, and the impulse to create. Inspired in part by the life and music of Amy Winehouse, Judy Garland is Not a Sunrise also considers themes of mental health and embodiement.

Soot challenges an American fascination with violence through the lenses of childhood and parenthood. There are questions with the hope of answers: How are generational lessons altered toward a more caring future? How is loss reimagined as growth? When will the pumpjack stop?

As humans we're afraid of so much, but our fears are really nothing compared to the myriad of hidden dangers of life. This book examines 27 things we could add to our lists of reasons not to get out of bed in the morning, but somehow we still get up, make the coffee, and go about our lives anyway. Semi-finalist in the 2021 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition from Finishing Line Press, the debut poetry chapbook, 27 Threats to Everyday Life, by Montana writer Anne Holub examines how we live where even small dangers -- a bridge, a bee, a cigarette - can spell catastrophe. The collection includes the poem "Mudslides," which was honored as runner-up in the 2022 Mountain West Writers Contest, by the Western Humanities Review.

Questions lie at the heart of Steve Wilson's latest collection, Complicity. In poems that wander confidently across a wide range of subjects, places and voices, Wilson works at making sense through musicality, within the movement of lines, upon the interplay of empty space and evocative images, against the pressures of isolation. The effect of Complicity is that we are watching a world being made.

This Persistent Gravity explores our deepest longings to find wholeness, our desire to set things right and to, as Wordsworth wrote, see "into the life of things." This desire to reconcile only exists because things have gone wrong, sometimes in sudden terrible ways but mostly in gradual inevitable ways, the consequences of daily living-aging parents, broken hearts, even growing children. Inspired by Romantic poetry, astronomy, physics, nature, and motherhood, the poems in this debut collection chronicle what it means to live and lose and what exists in the wake of our losses. It's about waiting, surrendering, and rediscovering joy and awe in the midst of a fallen world.

Prescribed Burn is a collection of poems that trace the complicated nature of love and pain. It is a close exploration of the relational landscapes between parents and children, friends and lovers, even the self and society. These poems delve into the joy of connection and the bravery necessary to change, to choose love and life in our darkest moments. This book chronicles the human struggle to decipher what to hold dear, what must be nurtured and what must be destroyed in order for new growth to blossom.

Divorce Papers: A Slow Burn deftly traverses the wide terrain of a couple's final years of marriage-from the first moment the wife places the match under matrimony to her ultimate flight as the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes. An incendiary cross examination of the tiny embers that smolder and scorch through the narrator's body "writhing in [her] bones like barbed wire," Divorce Papers takes an unflinching look at the delicate dance of separation and all of its fractures, fissures and ruptures in intimate detail. Throughout this journey we experience a deep, intense love and compassion for the narrator's children, as well as the transmutation of marital strife into personal liberation. These poems ignite the imagination and heart with breathtaking intensity and leave us in awe to watch the narrator soar above the wreckage and ash.

Summer in Oklahoma always brings heat, storm, and explosions of life on the tallgrass prairie, one of the most severely threatened ecosystems on earth. In recent summers, human drama has eclipsed its natural wonders. A global pandemic caught the state in a death grip, along with new moments of reckoning with Oklahoma's painful demographic history, including the removal of Native People to Indian Territory after the Civil War and the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. Oklahoma Summer registers its summer heat, celebrates Oklahoma's beauty, laments its people's pain, and reaches for new possibilities.