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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: She Watches Wild Horses by Elisa Salasin

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She Watches Wild Horses tells of an epic quest to repatriate a dying poet from exile in Mexico. As told by niece Elisa Salasin, it also, thrillingly, maps this mortal and verbal journey as the poet in her is awakened. The resulting chapbook is a tapestry of poetry and prose, dreams and the reality of growth, loss, and the complex paths that love takes throughout our lives. It is both the chronicle of a poet’s death, and a rebirth experienced in throes of motherhood, creativity, and change.

Elisa Salasin is a poet and educator based in Berkeley, CA. She has had poetry, essays, op-eds, and photography, published in Colossus:Freedom, AMP:always electric, SF Public Library Poem of the Day, sPARKLE & bLINK, CounterPunch, and the Bay Area Writing Project’s Digital Paper.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR She Watches Wild Horses by Elisa Salasin

Elisa Salasin has written a stunning volume — at once a complex, extended elegy for her uncle, the late poet Sal Salasin, and a record of her own evolution as a poet. Laced through with passages that may be dreams, with the words of Sal himself, She Watches Wild Horses is poised on the edge between the ordinary and the visionary, between mourning and revelation. And throughout the book runs a theme of gratitude for the rawness and the amazement of living. Thank you, Elisa Salasin, for this collection!

–Anita Barrows, author of Testimony

“There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who’ve helped a person die and those who haven’t,” quotes poet Elisa Salasin in She Watches Wild Horses. Riveting, tender, and unflinchingly honest, this essential collection—part elegy, part memoir, and part dream—explores family love, loneliness, loss, the human desire for a life of meaning, the messiness of dying, and the challenge of resuming life after losing a loved one. This multi-genre chapbook weaves poems, dreams, journal-like prose pieces, original photographs, and excerpts of poetry by the author’s uncle, Sal Salasin, who passed away from cancer in 2009. “How can all this weightlessness survive,” writes the old poet, and his niece, holding his hand at his bedside, writes, “I am here. / That is all. / I am here.”

–Hollie Hardy, author of How to Take a Bullet, And Other Survival Poems

In this moving book, Elisa Salasin has created a documentary elegy–quilt-like in its collaging of fragments from journals, poems, reflections, and photographs– for her uncle, the poet Sal Salasin, who she cared for as he lay dying. Eschewing sentimentality, this book tells the story of both what it means to take care of a person who is dying, and what it means to be that person. The story that is told here is revealed through the pieces of text and photographs that speak from the moment in which they were composed, and reveal the mundanity of caretaking, the intensity of pain, and the moments of humor that comprise any end-of-life journey. In the end, this tender weaving shows how committing to hospice care for Sal brings Salasin to the edge of her own life, and the reckoning that “I cannot continue to wait, cannot delay my living. None of us can.” This book, She Watches Wild Horses unravels the complexity of that reckoning with tender perception.

–Kristin Prevallet, author of I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time

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leahhuetemaines · 2 years

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Where Things Start by Luba Ostashevsky

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Luba Ostashevsky teaches chemistry at a high school in North Brooklyn and works as a literary agent. She immigrated from the Soviet Union with her family as a child. Her verse and short fiction have been published in Orbis, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Broad River Review, The Cape Rock,Newtown Literary, Straight Forward Poetry, New Engagement and The Cortland Review. She lives in Queens, NY.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Where Things Start by Luba Ostashevsky

The title of this beautiful collection is so apt: in these poems, we indeed experience “the pleasure of not knowing what comes next”, which is one of the great pleasures poetry can give. In other words, we are constantly surprised by where these poems go: they will move from beautiful and close observation of the natural world; to a childhood memory of Soviet Russia; to meditations on scientific phenomena; to the experience of love, sexuality, parenthood, and day to day life in the city. This is Ostashevsky’s world: rich, delightful, analytical, deeply felt. The poet brings the entirety of her self into her work, the entirety of a life being lived. She transforms its complexities into surprising pleasures. Her implicit questions to us: should a poem be any less mysterious than life itself? Isn’t there great pleasure to be had in not knowing what comes next?

–Geoffrey Nutter, author of Cities of Dawn

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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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#poetry #preorder #flp authors #poets on tumblr #american poets #chapbook #leah maines #women poets #chapbooks #finishing line press #small press #book cover #books #publishers #poets #poem #smallpress #poems #binderfullofpoets

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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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ADVANCE ORDER: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/an-engraved-woman-by-jenquia-jamison/

AN ENGRAVD WOMAN tells a multitude of stories that so many of us #women face with life’s #challenges and #trauma’s, whether it’s struggles with love, family, self-love and ragging battles with sin. Collectively, I’ve written not just from my own experiences, but from others as well. Speaking about hurt buried deep within often times can be seen as holding onto negativity. I say, finding your voice allows you to be freed from it. We as women are strong yet are often forgotten and my collection of poetic lines reminds each one that she is not alone.

Jenquia Jamison was born in New Orleans, LA. Growing up in such a colorful and lively city gave her a profound affection for art in all of its innumerable forms. She is a self-taught poet and acrylic painter whose adoration for her craft is given to embolden others. Her artwork and poetry can be seen by visiting her website @ artistryofaneclecticsoul.com.

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Out of Love in Spring by Hailey Spencer

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Out of Love in Spring is a strange little book about love, loss, and the changing of the seasons. This collection walks us through a journey of falling in love before you’re ready, and falling out of love exactly when you’re meant to. From pantoums on killing birds to job applications about the loss of identity after a breakup, this collection will surprise and delight at every turn.

Hailey Spencer is, in the words of her wife Elizabeth, an absolute cloud of a girl. She is obsessed with fairy tales and has an equally passionate rivalry with ants. She lives and writes in Seattle. For more on Hailey and her work, visit haileyspencerwrites.com

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Out of Love in Spring by Hailey Spencer

Rated 5.00out of 5 based on 1customer rating

“Hailey Spencer’s intense, intimate poems announce the arrival of a powerful new voice on the poetry scene. With the clarity of a wordsmith, the ear of a musician, and the feelings of a heart boiling over with passion, Spencer traces the pilgrimage of love from desperation to resignation. In this tightly integrated collection one biting poem to the next thrills the reader with unforgettable images woven together with subtle rhyme:

“Last night we unzipped our skin.

I thought it’d be a relief to be human again

But to my surprise, I found

that I missed the smell of smoke

from the villages I left burning in my wake.”

Spencer’s voice is relentless as she drills into the dangers of love. Read these wonderful poems at your peril—and your delight.”

–Sharon Cumberland, author of Strange With Age.

“I often worry that I am unable to tell the difference between the brilliant and the abysmal in poetry. Then I see something like this and it reassures me that I can tell when something is good.”

–Catherine Potter, editor, Red Ogre Review

“Hailey Spencer’s Out of Love in Spring takes the reader on a pilgrimage, along the pathways of a story that is both universal and deeply personal – the falling into and out of love: both source and abyss. The short epigraph-like pieces introducing each of the chapbook’s four parts haunt like Sappho’s fragments, a fitting echo for poems unafraid to leap headlong into passion’s turbulence.”

–Laura J. Braverman, author of Salt Water

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Regarding Us by Terri Drake

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Regarding Us is a song cycle addressed to the absent beloved. In it, the river becomes a living, breathing entity – a confidante to whom grief is expressed. Here the present and the past coexist in simultaneous dimensions The poems explore what it is like to live in a physical body that interacts with the natural landscape and how that interaction and the power of story shape and define our world.

Terri Drake is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Regarding Us, At the Seams (Bear Star Press) and Singing in a Dark Language (New CollAge Press). Her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Poets Reading the News, Quarry West, and Online Journal of Arts and Letters, among others. She has also been published in the Chicago Review. She is a practicing psychoanalyst and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Regarding Us by Terri Drake

“Incantatory and lushly imagistic, Terri Drake’s Regarding Us is a haunting elegy for love and landscape lost—a pilgrim’s journey through distances both temporal and geographic. From the stark space of the midwestern prairie to the abundant and imperiled vineyards of California, Drake tracks the currents of fire and water that ravage or sustain, revisiting a complex history in the wake of a beloved’s death. Though memory conjures “sentence after sentence of disquiet” and “unwritten stanzas//trailing like the tail of a comet/in winter’s darkness,” the poet forges a path through grief, past the “shrill anthems of the world.” Regarding Us reflects a fierce vision of restorative wisdom rooted in the elemental. “I believe” Drake writes, “the live oak bears witness/to our losses. That our grief/is equal to our love.” These are poems of remarkable beauty and uncanny grace.”

–Jane Satterfield, author of Apocalypse Mix

Weaving grief into celebration, the relentless, transcendent lyricism of Regarding Us hurls readers into another world where loss is sutured to song. Drake invites the reader to celebrate the “I” of the collection’s desire for the “you”—triumphally constituting the “us” of the volume through empathy and irresistible image. Surviving fire, distance, and dysfunction, the poems weave a poignant trajectory that creates the “us” that is retrospectively lost—such that readers too cannot but hold them both in highest regard.

–Dion Farquhar, author Just Kidding

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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: The Coffin Makers by Heather Corbally Bryant

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The Coffin Makers is an exploration of our daily lives as the COVID 19 pandemic began to sweep through our lives. The poems throughout this book record, wonder, and struggle with the changes that began first to flutter and then to roar through our existence. In delving into what life was like as so much that we had taken for granted was upturned, these poems reflect the questions we began to have about the way we had always lived our lives. The book charts the trajectory of the immense disruptions and inequities–both personal and global–that began to become clear during this time of unrest, disruption, and dislocation. At its heart lies the question the pandemic laid bare: how do we live our lives?

Heather Corbally Bryant, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. She has also taught at Harvard, the University of Michigan and the Pennsylvania State University where she has won awards for her teaching. She has written eleven books of poetry, a prize-winning academic book, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War, and a work of creative nonfiction, You Can’t Wrap Fire in Paper. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and have won Honorable Mention in the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition.

PRAISE FOR The Coffin Makers by Heather Corbally Bryant

“Heather Corbally Bryant’s eleventh collection of poetry shows her deepening grasp of language, and follows her grappling with the exigencies of a global pandemic in both intricate and plainspoken poetry.”

–Laura Munson, bestselling author and founder of Haven Writing Retreats

In The Coffin Makers, Heather Corbally Bryant offers us poetic witness to a world turned upside down by catastrophic fear, in clear, beautiful poems, marking out our moments of grief, isolation and hope, step by step. These poems will remain with us as graceful testament to our moment of crisis.

–Eibhear Walshe, Director of Creative Writing, University College Cork

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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: 27 Threats to Everyday Life by Anne Holub

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As a child, did you used to leave the house with a caution and a warning from your parents? Drive safe! Be careful! What did you worry about when you walked alone in the dark? The chapbook, “27 Threats to Everyday Life,” explores everyday encounters with danger, fear, and survival through specific poems. This collection isn’t a study in morbidity, but instead examines living in a world where even small dangers can lead to catastrophe. Does the threat of danger keep you at home instead of taking risks? Or does even a life behind your door pose its own potential disasters? What have you forgotten to be afraid about?

Anne Holub received a MFA from the University of Montana and a MA from Hollins University. Her poetry has been featured on Chicago Public Radio and in The Mississippi Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, Phoebe and the anthology Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing (Open Country Press 2018), among others. She lives and writes in Montana.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR 27 Threats to Everyday Life by Anne Holub

Anne Holub’s extra-ordinary poems mark wayposts on a life examined with verve and smarts. They name fears we fear to name. They unfold questions. They do not flinch. Changing landscapes, memory, bees, the body’s gifts and vulnerabilities: they’re all here, and with them, the sweet surprises of the poet’s art—of well-chosen words, well shaped.

–Jeanne Larsen, author of What Penelope Chooses: poems

As is often the case with our most primal words, “threat” is an old one, and understandably so, with its denotation of impending danger, menace, or coercion — forces environmental, societal, and somatic that have accompanied human life since its beginnings. Anne Holub’s 27 Threats to Everyday Life offers a litany of such potential vexations, ranging from the personal and quotidian (dental plaque and insomnia, for example, or an air-conditioner “held high above with nothing / more than optimism /and a brick”) to the globally dire (mudslides, wildfires, floods, the corona virus). Sonically attuned to the inextricable links between humans and the world they inhabit, these poems are a bellwether, timeless and timely, offering, with a convincing dose of hope, both “a warning [and] a watch” for our imperiled moment.

–Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

In a hazardous world, and across wild landscapes at once beautiful and threatening, Anne Holub‘s poems keep vigil. Even as they interrogate our notions of safety and wholeness, they find small mercies, too. This is a remarkable collection about the ways we survive, despite everything.

–Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life

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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Judy Garland is Not a Sunrise by E.F. Schraeder

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The author of the gothic novella Liar: Memoir of a Haunting (Omnium Gatherum, 2021) and other works, E.F. Schraeder often writes about not quite real worlds. Schraeder is an avid gardener and hot pepper enthusiast who believes in ghosts, magic, and dogs. You can find news and say hello online at efschraeder.com.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Judy Garland is Not a Sunrise by E.F. Schraeder

In Judy Garland is Not a Sunrise, E. F. Schraeder coaxes Amy Winehouse’s life from somber shadows into a powerful klieg spotlight, with insightful poems that are both dissection and homage. In “Cameras and Ink,” she notes that Winehouse is …swimming in vinegar, a brine of declension; in “Junk,” she observes that Her noose <is a> a microphone / swinging. Schraeder’s concluding poem in the collection, “Twenty Seven,” nails it succinctly: Don’t worry about much / or over commit, / we tell ourselves: / we have time. / And we do / until we don’t. Whether or not you are familiar with Winehouse and her music, these poems are sure to rock you.

–Dianne Borsenik, Raga for What Comes Next (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019)

Judy Garland is Not a Sunrise is a meditation on fame and the horrors and responsibilities that come along with it, for better or worse. This collection gives an honest look into the life and lifestyle of artists and discusses how fans oftentimes marry suffering to the creation of art, all while commenting on mental health, the body, and how the heart processes pain, overstimulation, and the need to constantly produce and survive. A must-read for poets and artists alike.”

–Stephanie M. Wyotovich, Bram Stoker Award® winner

Lyrical and melancholy, Schraeder’s Judy Garland is Not a Sunrise is an unfiltered Norma Jean tribute to songstress Amy Winehouse. A small volume with ‘velvet insides’, this collection comprises exquisite ‘fire-kiss’ poems that ‘sing from the veins’ on ashtray-regret themes of self-destruction and addiction. An unsettling and compelling offering from an exceptional voice in horror poetry.”

–Lee Murray, USA Today Bestselling author and double Bram Stoker Award® winner

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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: This Persistent Gravity by Angie Crea O’Neal

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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.

Angie Crea O’Neal’s work has appeared in Sycamore Review, The Christian Century, The Windhover, Cumberland River Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, where she lives with her daughters.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR This Persistent Gravity by Angie Crea O’Neal

The Old Testament, the history of poetry, “the thrumming music of bodies”: Angie Crea O’Neal’s superb new collection contains multitudes and rewards numerous careful readings. These are poems to fall into and wander, as many-roomed as heavenly mansions. Together, they comprise what will surely be among the year’s most auspicious debuts.

–Graham Hillard, Editor, Cumberland River Review

In Angie Crea O’Neal’s vibrant first collection This Persistent Gravity, she guides us with a sensitive hand through the difficulties and fears of single motherhood and the joys and losses time brings. She invites us to “climb the streets of your childhood, the place / that still holds you, haunts you like a dream” in search of wisdom and truth. These poems contain the mundane and small – laundry, Mayflies, playing in the hose in the summer—alongside the philosophies of Milton, Hopkins, and the Holy Bible, and lead us “Back to paying attention as / we listen for the lonesome shrill of a night / train in the distance, its promise of going home.”

–Renee Emerson, author of Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2022)

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: We Who Dream by Gwynn O’Gara

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We Who Dream celebrates love and sex, and looks to the medicine of the natural world to deal with grief and heartache. In O’Gara’s vision the landscapes of Northern California and Mexico become instruments of desire, and strong and giving women answer calls for justice. We Who Dreamtakes us on the journey of making new life, guided by the ancient ones who lead us through danger as we dream our future.

Gwynn O’Gara is a Northern California poet with roots in the natural world, Beat poetry, and her early years in Mexico. O’Gara found her voice performing in San Francisco’s North Beach, and her first book, Snake Woman Poems, was celebrated at City Lights Bookstore in 1983. Gwynn was honored to serve as Sonoma County Poet Laureate from 2010-2011. As a California Poet in the Schools, she explored the joys and mysteries of written and recited poetry with children, teens and adults. Published in Calyx, Paddlefish, and The Comstock Review, O’Gara’s work also appears in anthologies, including Beatitude Silver and Gold editions; Sisters Born, Sisters Found, and Pillow, Exploring the Heart of Eros. Her chapbooks include Fixer-Upper, Winter at Green Haven, and Sea Cradles. She makes her home under redwoods and fruit trees.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR We Who Dream by Gwynn O’Gara

At once as “amorous as the dawn” with her “salty, sweet” breath, We Who Dream by Gwynn O’Gara carries the rhythms of love. From the poem “Love Crazed” in which the persona reveals, “you always were a fool about men” to “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” who confesses, “my only weakness—love,” this is a wonderfully cohesive book of poetry delving into the excesses, joys, and dream-qualities of love and sex/ sex and love. In “The Tent Door Opens and Closes,” the poet offers, “the dark/ vine of a man washes me with pomegranate and aloe,” then leaves us in the dream, wanting yet another in “We Who Dream” with the lines, “Reborn in dream-water/ lovers cradle one another.”

We Who Dream transports us through an unconventional eroticism layered in esotericism but always fertile: “Egos/ entwined at our feet, I dream the first night.” The book is, indeed, a “home-run moon.”

–Nancy Dafoe, author of Innermost Sea, novella Naimah and Ajmal, and memoir Unstuck in Time.

The poems in We Who Dream strike so many deep chords—intimate, sexual, environmental, mythical, visionary. Gwynn O’Gara’s gift is the unexpected. There are lines that transport the reader to the threshold of the familiar, inspiring visions of what’s possible just beyond; others pirouette on that edge, opening to an utterly different reality. Mating harbor seals become sleeping beauties; a clam slowly unfolds into “secret, stranger, lover, moon.” Ultimately, these poems kindle a connection, take us to our human core where, like paper cranes, we are threaded each to each by miracles, by incantation, by dreams.

–Terry Ehret, author of Lucky Break and Night Sky Journey

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth by Cathy Hailey

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I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth features ekphrastic poems inspired by an episodic performance of the Moscow Festival Ballet interwoven with poems of refuge from grief, the comfort and healing found in nature, memory, and family. The poems are an exploration of mimesis in Aristotle’s sense, a re-representing of life–a witnessing and re-animation of the lives of all creatures in nature–the biosphere, the artistic life as performed on stage in the ballet, the spiritual life beyond, and a hope that illuminating the interconnectedness of all can bring about a renewed consciousness. I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth is a venture into the haiku sonnet, a hybrid form combining eastern and western poetic styles.

Cathy Hailey teaches as an adjunct lecturer in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program and previously taught high school English and Creative Writing in Prince William County (PWC), Virginia. She is Northern Region Vice President of The Poetry Society of Virginia (PSV) and organizes In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in PWC. Her writing has been published inThe New Verse News, Poetry Virginia, Written in Arlington, Stay Salty: Life in the Garden State (Vol. 2), Poetry for Ukraine (THE POET), Family (THE POET), and NoVA Bards. Poems are forthcoming in The Poetry Society of Virginia Centennial Anthology.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth by Cathy Hailey

Cathy Hailey’s venturesome book combines the crystalline image of haiku with the sonnet’s classic lyricism. Her poem ‘In Closing’ says, “There’s magic in condensing, / precision in expressing.” Magic is the right word when tradition and innovation spark new life into poetry. Clarity and prosody, East and West, formalism and liberation, all come together in I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth. There’s nothing more beautiful than harmony on the page.

–Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

When you settle in to experience the dance of Cathy Hailey’s words, images, and symbols in her collection, I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth, you will not only feel like you’re an audience member of a deeply moving ballet – the poet’s form bringing words to life – but you will also be transfixed by the way her lyric poems show us life in all its complexity, beauty, and heartache. The ballet within the ballet reveals the richness between art and life: glimpses into Hailey’s own family relationships, rich in ancestry and love but also in grief, as well as meditations on nature and our connection to Earth’s creatures, and even the tragedy of so much loss of life due to the pandemic. Through the movement of Hailey’s poems, we feel how all of us – all of creation – are connected, how art helps us transcend sadness, and how beauty – like the sun – rises each morning, as we carry on in life’s great dance.

–Kathy Cable Smaltz, Poet Laureate, Emerita, Prince William County, VA

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Under Glass by Victoria Woolf Bailey

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Victoria Woolf Bailey’s poems have appeared in a number of publications including the Riverbend Review, Still, the Journal, Pegasus, The Heartland Review, Kudzu, and The Single Hound as well as the Motif 3 anthology All the Livelong Day published by MotesBooks. In 2012 she won Accents Publishing Short Poem Award from the Kentucky State Poetry Society as well as Honorable Mention in the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning’s Next Great Writers contest. Her first chapbook Dragging Gunter’s Chain was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. An upcoming chapbook Under Glass is scheduled to be released by Finishing Line Press in 2023.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Under Glass by Victoria Woolf Bailey

If you resist Marie Kondo and Swedish death cleaning, Under Glass is the poetry collection for you. Victoria Woolf Baily is the Pied Piper of Stuff. She celebrates the child peering from a garage sale frame, dead butterflies, and pickled poke. A 1933 photo of an insurance salesmen’s convention reminds her that no one can say any longer what happened. Her flute takes us on our own journeys with stuff and all those connected to it. This is a poignant and human book that you won’t put down.

–Gail Chandler, author of Where the Red Road Meets the Sky

Stuff, stuff, stuff. We all have it. Unique collections, found treasures, yard sale must-haves, “pictures of big-eyed girls”, “window frames.” Things we hold onto like lostrelationships, old memories — the beautiful, the bizarre. The poems in Under Glass by Victoria Woolf Bailey are like etchings on smoked glass. They make transparent the force to gather the discarded, the lost, what we may use some day, even a glimpse into the world of true hoarding. Bailey lets us peer into the inexorable light of a need without obscuring our ability to see “we are always searching for something we have lost.”

–Georgia Wallace, Green River Writers poet, author of The Coming Fall

Victoria Bailey’s Under Glass is crammed with Things and stirs in the reader an urge to rush to the nearest Salvation Army store, dump, or up to the attic and start digging. These poems illustrate the sometimes-illusive truth that treasures wait everywhere, ready to be discovered.

–Mary E. O’Dell – author of A Dangerous Man and Poems for The Man Who Weighs Light

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: The Length of a Clenched Fist by L A Felleman

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LA Felleman is an accountant at the University of Iowa, Prior to that she was a seminary professor, and before that she was a pastor. She moved to Iowa City with her husband in 2016, and began writing poetry soon after settling in this UNESCO City of Literature. She organizes an open mic at the local library (or via Zoom during pandemics) and serves on the advisory council of Iowa City Poetry. This is her first chapbook.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR The Length of a Clenched Fist by L A Felleman

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At monthly open mic readings over the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate and look forward to LA Felleman’s poems, their conversational whimsy, their confident understatedness. Now you too can encounter these poems that fade “to a fragile pale glint.” In writing that spans the first eight months of the pandemic and quarantine, Felleman shares a generous range of interests, concerns, and sympathies – from Amazonian vampire bats to white privilege, from her landlord to Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, from the derecho to sandhill cranes. You’ll discover poems that have the crisp, chiseled feel of prayers addressing our faith, doubt, grace, and grief, that ponder how the world might be “if only I had more.”

–David Duer, recently retired from teaching English language arts at Cedar Rapids Washington High School. He served for many years as the Washington Literary Press faculty advisor. In the late seventies he was the editor of the literary magazine Luna Tack, and in the early eighties performed his poetry with local new wave bands The Monos’lab Orchestra and Pink Gravy. Duer worked as an editorial associate and assistant printer at The Toothpaste Press and Coffee House Press until its move from West Branch, Iowa, to Minneapolis. His work has appeared in Ascent, Exquisite Corpse, English Journal, Little Village, North American Review, and Poetry, among others. A chapbook of his poetry, To Bread (o.p.), has been published by Coffee House Press.

LA Felleman’s The Length of a Clenched Fist lives in the only habitable places of the early pandemic: crowded grocery stores, bird cam livestreams, wetland trails, borrowed homes, and memories of the Before Times. Instead of trying to keep pace with a year of global health crises, social uprisings, and natural disasters, these poems fall into step with rhythms of the domestic and natural worlds, the grounding repetitive acts of sweeping floorboards and listening to the calls of sandhill cranes. Under Felleman’s meditative gaze, poetry becomes a practice, too: she observes the seemingly circumscribed world so closely that it begins to shimmer and swell, spilling out over the edges of quarantined life.

–Becca Klaver

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Palace of Twigs by Diana Deering

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Diana Deering lives in the Pacific Northwest and works as a hospice nurse.

Her chapbook, Flame Shoulder Moth, was published by Finishing Line Press.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Palace of Twigs by Diana Deerin

Diana Deering’s exquisitely crafted lyric poems unfurl entire universes inside small moments of time. The poet-speaker time-travels throughout the collection, revisiting early childhood and adolescence and moving through various ages as an adult, often standing at the threshold between the living and dead. To say Deering is a religious poet is not to say she professes any dogma or specific faith but that she is a poet who is ‘in this world but not of it’ entirely. Everything Deering observes in these poems—her ‘devotions’ rendered in meticulous, gorgeous images—even amidst elegy, becomes a way to bind the outer and inner selves, the material to the spiritual. These are ‘luminous’ poems, brimming with insight and feeling as they fearlessly ‘gaze into the next world.’

–Shara McCallum

Acknowledging the dignified reserve of twilight moments—birth, death, childhood discoveries—these poems’ crystalline language moves without fanfare, but with quiet luminescence. Deering’s work speaks of a profound inwardness, never solipsistic, always inviting. She taps the unseen seams of what keeps it altogether, mushroom colonies or people in our rural neighborhoods. This is the infinite life we have, this poetry states, right here and now, on this “wide answering earth.” I have waited for this book for years.

–Lorraine Healy, author of “Mostly Luck” and “The Habit of Buenos Aires”

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finishinglinepress · 2 years

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Float by Wendy Miles

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In Wendy Miles’s debut collection, a girl navigates illness, death and grief—generations of family trauma. The poems echo traditional forms and range from confessional to elegiac. Set in a rural Virginia landscape dotted with abandoned houses and marked by hayfields and cattle, the book is imbued with memory and spirits of the lost.

Wendy Miles has published her work in places such as Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review and Hunger Mountain. Yona Harvey selected her title poem “Float” as the winner of the 2014 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. Wendy lives and writes in Virginia.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Float by Wendy Miles

In Wendy Miles’s stunning debut collection, memories break and enter the rooms of the present and objects come alive with the spirits of those who once possessed them. Miles’s poems are inextricably tied to place – pastures, houses, yards and rooms – but there’s a restlessness to them, too, an exquisite tension to their lyricism and a refusal to be still. These poems leap and roam and strike out into territory that’s as startling as it is fresh. “Love is a breath,” Miles writes at the conclusion of the titular poem. Reader, this outstanding book will have you catching yours.

–Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math

In Float, Wendy Miles excavates place and memory in search of what “will not be called a ghost for many years.” Her sacred elegies unearth relationships to mine their links: a bird is a girl “pleading for mouth aflame,” a cat is a mother, “face streaked behind a roof of hands,” and a father is a redbud, yielding “to the hush, the barest pink light.” At the center: the tether of suffering to love.

–Allison Wilkins, author of Girl Who

Float is a remarkable debut collection filled with vital, visceral imagery and fully formed within the fractured and yet unclouded syntax of remembrance. I was held throughout by its pulse and the cleaving resonance of its crafted language. Miles gives us lines taut as thread wound around a finger, so that wherever the speaker of these poems points our attention, a heartbeat is always present.

–Jon Pineda, author of Let’s No One Get Hurt

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