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"...these are the kinds of books that sell at poetry readings and connect readers to writers who do the good work of small press publishing. For that, Finishing Line Press should be commended." --Michael Anthony Bradshaw, American Book Review ` Praise for Letters From Down Under by Constance Alexander Letters From Down Under is a slim volume of powerful poetry by poet, essayist, playwright and Murray State University Arts and Humanities Faculty Scholar Constance Alexander. Her title reference, "down under," is an emotional territory primarily populated by women. Yet the aim of Alexander's stunning, vibrant verse is to engage readers of both sexes in exploring the vicissitudes of the human heart. There's nothing sentimental about Alexander's work. Her voice and images are strong, her attitudes are direct, and her humor is dead-on delightful. In fact, her precise diction and utter honesty embody sentiment itself. Letters From Down Under is a remarkable book that's a must-have addition to comprehensive collections of contemporary poetry, feminist literature and Kentucky authors' work. --L. Elisabeth Beattie, The Louisville Courier-Journal • June 7, 2008 Praise for Gentling the Bones by Katherine E. Young History, family, and family history are insightfully examined in poems that are a pleasure to read and to discuss. They are intriguing in part because of their self-awareness as imagined scenes. The surface of the "real" past, that is, the detail available directly through observation and hearsay, emphasizes its ordinariness.... Yet the recreated imagined past has a freshness and vitality that goes beyond the surface detail. The poems of Gentling the Bones are not only about the speaker's southernness but about the act of reinventing it, the romance of history. We see the formation of particular images of the past, viewed from a certain angle. This chapbook makes a fine debut for poet Katherine Young. --Janet McCann, BigCityLit: www.BigCityLit.com 2008 ` Praise for Roomful of Sparrows by Mary Buchinger I appreciate the proportions in registers of sentiment Buchinger has kept to. The common resounds more commonly throughout the book. She observes sparrows, beetles, reads Tolstoy, goes skating (on a pond with a frog frozen in it), companionably in a day to day world that is familiar to us. As she trumps the exceptional experience of flying in Business Class, she elevates mundane occurrences into exceptionally perceptive moments. --Michael Todd Steffen. Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene 2008 ` Praise for The Thorne Fence by Pearl Karrer "The metaphor of the thorn fence serves for the barriers between prey and predator, between first and third worlds, between ourselves and nature. These barriers are explored with nuance and an eye for contrast. We discover a land and culture both nurishing and harsh, a land of 'wildebeest grazing among wildebeest bones.'" --Jeanne Wagner in the Poetry Letter & Literary Review, California State Poetry Society, Issue No. 1, 2008 ` Praise for Case Walking: An Aids Case Manager Wails Her Blues by Julene Tripp Weaver "Case Walking: An Aids Case Manager Wails Her Blues is populated by those whom we expect to find: homeless people, people addicted to illegal injectables, and a broken system, but what makes the collection remarkable is that without making excuses for behavior; without making religious or moral condemnations, Julene Tripp Weaver shows us the intimate details of her clients lives, making them everyday people who share the emotions, dreams and desires common to all. It is difficult to read "How often Do You Change Your" sheets, which focuses on a heroin addict who can’t find housing due to his criminal record but says he will change his sheets "every day/once he has an apartment simply because there is nothing/like getting into bed between clean sheets," and be unable relate to his desire for a place of his own, and a clean bed to sleep upon. -- GA. A. Banks-Martin , hercircleezine.com The most moving, and possibly redeeming, of these poems is “Special Order,” in which Weaver counsels a dying patient on his end-of-life arrangements: the living will, the power of attorney, and “what it is you want to eat before you die,” so that she’ll have time to put in a special order. This is the deeply humanizing moment the collection seeks, where the line between caseworker and client blur, where Weaver imagines she would want a large strawberry milkshake as her last meal. While these poems may not be saying anything new, they bear witness to the complex emotional web of those working on the frontlines to combat AIDS, poverty and addiction. They remind us of one of our most fundamental questions: How does anyone, sick or not, survive the loneliness and distance? -- Jen Garfield, Prick of the Spindle ` Praise for CHROME by Lianne Spidel " The observations of Lianne Spidel are sometimes poignant, sometimes ironic, always precise. There is a thrill that comes in the reading of each poem when we say to ourselves, 'Yes, that's it, she's hit the nail on the head.'" -- David Lee Garrison, RATTLE, No. 28 ` Praise for Mother Chaos: Under Electric Light, by Mattie Quesenberry Smith It seems to me that the crafting of poetry requires a finely tuned command of the English language. Mattie possesses this quality in a manner which has become rare in our time. Her poems can be pondered over and over again with fresh insights gleaned, illumining the present realities with words that conjure images like a watercolor painting. -- Elena Maria Vida, Tea at Trianon ` Praise for Elegy and Collapse by Patty Paine "Poetry can be therapy to wounded people. Patty Paine releases a great anguish in Elegy and Collapse....Many of these poems are representations of her agony and frustration as part of a refugee Korean family stifled by our society's indifference. She tells hard truths in many of these poems. Like painting and music, poetry can be an expressive remedy in many instances. " --Paul Zimmer, Georgia Review ` Praise for Leave Time by Jeff Worley "Jeff Worley's Leave Time is a lovely and moving dirge for his father, a wounded World War II veteran, stricken and at last taken by Alzheimer's disease. This story is told often by good writers these days, but Worley's treatment is especially crisp and adept." --Paul Zimmer, Georgia Review ` Praise for How to Get There by Paul J. Willis (available on amazon.com) "Repeatedly throughout this handsomely bound little book we feel that we have indeed been guided through the material, the manifest - with much praise and even awe - and then across a bridge to the hands of something else entirely: the other dimension of life's fullness, the spirit." --Carmine Sarracino, Prairie Schooner ` Praise for Into The River Somewhere by Mark Jackley Mark Jackley's is a poetry of moments. There are twenty-five brief poems in this chapbook, and each seizes upon its own small miracle, or asks a koan-like question for which there is no answer. In this way, we follow the poet's heart, at times like "blind men bumping in the dark," and at others with the illumination of a personal delight to guide us. Conversational, but with the ability to move easily across time and space, Jackley's poems let the reader lose themselves in a moment, as when rain "bumps against the window, / staggered and ecstatic / to bring the news: The heavens / cup the earth, and now / the world is small, and quiet, / as a breath." Praise for Gentling the Bones by Katherine E. Young Such rich verses, though revealing, actually provide fuel for continual discovery, the reader acutely aware of the complexity of roots and of origin. Young's ability to capture the profundity of life also shines through, exuding such ease of pen and heart that no room remains for questions of emotive authenticity or reader motivation. -- Whitney M. Smith, The Montserrat Review ` Praise for Hollyhocks by Robert L. Brimm All of Brimm’s poems are unpretentious and easy to understand. Like Billy Collins, he believes that a poem should invite the reader in and then show him its mystery. We read the poems and immediately know what they mean; we read them again to savor them. -- David Lee Garrison, Ohio Writer ` Praise for Mine by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell (available on amazon.com) "Angela Alaimo O’Donnell brings us the graceful 28 page chapbook Mine, a poetic memoir of growing up in the anthracite mining towns of northeast Pennsylvania 'where culm dumps rise camel-backed/ against an ashen sky.' The poems are finely crafted, with superb diction, tenderness, and plenty of heart as they detail what is now the lost world of the Italian immigrant miners of the Pittston/Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area. 'Inspired' is the best one-word description I know for this chapbook." -- Jennifer MacPherson, Comstock Review Poets: Books and Chapbooks, Oct. 2007 ` Praise for The Art of Writing and Others by George Held George Held’s 2007 FLP chapbook, The Art of Writing and Others, is a “Nov-Dec Pick” in Small Press Review. In his tenth book of poems, The Art of Writing and Others, George Held’s erudition is evident on every page. Melville, Van Gogh, John Donne, Bishop, Spenser – his topics range widely, yet his language and angle of approach is always intelligent and sensitive.... Although the endings of some of the poems may leave the reader wanting, Mr. Held’s work is full of liveliness and observation. He more than deserves the beautiful typesetting and careful editing that the well respected Finishing Line Press offers. -- Eleanor Goodman, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene , Dec. 2007 ` Praise for Eternity's Orthography by Claudia Serea (available on amazon.com) "Semifinalist in the 2007 open chapbook competition, the poems in this debut collection read like one long poem of linked haiku. The images and themes are recollections of her native Romania, recreating its beloved scenes of countryside and custom. I look forward eagerly to Ms. Serea's next offering. Praise for As If a Leaf Could Be Preserved by Alice Cone (available on amazon.com) "In these poems, the natural elements do not overwhelm the poetry in lush lyrical moments of expected imagery, but allow the mysticism of the earth to mingle with the reality of the speaker and ground the reader in the tangible experiences behind the imagery." --Silvana Unciano, Ohioana Quarterly , Fall 2007 `
Praise for The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald by John Guzlowski (available on amazon.com) "Guzlowski's poems are a meditation on his father's experience as a laborer in a Nazi camp. The holocaust always strikes me as a questionable medium for artistic enquiry, because its weight as a singular actuality always overwhelms the product. It seems right to feel intimidated and wary when confronting it as a spectator. After all—whoa—this happened and who can fully harness it? And yet, its power rarely misfires; the holocaust, as source material, is at once too fertile to admire and too fertile to find disappointing." -- Adam Robinson , JMWW , 2007 ` Praise for UNBOUND & BRANDED by Christine Stewart-Nuñez (available on amazon.com) "Following her first chapbook The Love of Unreal Things, Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s second chapbook Unbound & Branded is based on ‘a forty-page portfolio of artists … responding to supermodel Kate Moss’. Using the image of Kate Moss, she examines every woman’s complex relationship with her body, as it is viewed through the lens of media and art. By turns interrogatory, irreverent and self-possessed, the poems mirror the longing, absurd fascination, frustration and anger directed at society’s concept of the idealised female body." "This sisterhood is the final irony. Kate speaks in the rhetoric of the body; Stewart-Nuñez in the rhetoric of formal poetry. Both indulge in a form of exhibitionist art that conforms to and defies the dominant male aesthetic. Like Moss herself, these poems are in form but refuse to conform. Like Moss, they are both 'unbound,' set free from traditional fetters and "branded," turned into a product but also marked as a miscreant. For women, art is of the body. " ` Praise for Our Lady of the Shipwrecks by Alan Catlin (available on amazon.com) "It is an extraordinary challenge to write short lyrics that will convey the essence of place. Most readers look for the imagery that links location to the human story. Catlin's poems are painting in their own right, with the narrative elements implied. Where he succeeds, the music in the line and the images lift off the page. " ` Praise for Repairs by Jessica G. de Koninck (available on amazon.com) "These poems go beyond grief and a widow startled into a new life. They celebrate a good marriage and the strength of love. Here de Koninck's irony plays out in questions, as in the poem 'Absence,' where the simple difficulty is in answering the gas man's question, 'is my husband at home.' Similarly, the poem that asks 'How Far Away is Dead' explores the very questions we most want answered but for which there is no definitive response: 'Space folds in on itself / like the curved nuances of memory / or grief's sharp creases / in the brain...' " ` Praise for Left Standing by Ona Gritz (available on amazon.com) "There are few books of poetry that one picks up and reads straight through because they could not put it down, but Left Standing is one of them. Despite its apparent simplicity, it is a book that rewards rereading because more is learned each time. For beginning writers who feel that poetry can only be successful through the use of $50 words and extra-textual literary allusions, this collection should be mandatory reading. Without pretense, fanfare or emotional self-indulgence, Gritz shows you what poetry can do." -- Michael Northen, Wordgathering:a Journal of Disability Poetry, 2007 ` Praise for Drinking The Light by Laverne Frith (available on amazon.com) "Laverne Frith’s Drinking The Light is a beautifully crafted collection of poetry that encompasses beautiful writing, visual art, photography, as well as nature. " --Nan Mahon, Senior Magazine, Dec. 2007 "Laverne Frith’s Drinking The Light is an aesthetically astute poetry book. At first glance, the reader may think the 29 page chapbook will be a religious experience, but it isn’t really that. It’s a highly crafted collection of poetry that seems to teach the reader a lot of things, especially about beautiful writing, visual art, photography, as well as nature.." --Pam Rosenblatt, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, 2007 "Drinking the Light brings us two-dozen poems by the well-respected co-editor of Ekphrasis, Laverne Frith. Camille Norton points out that the true subject of these poems is perception itself. Because the poet is also proficient in the visual arts, he explores reality in a painterly way, dwelling in its details to explore its nature. The result is this fine collection of often nature-oriented, mostly ekphrastic poems: lucid and delicate yet rich in the telling detail." -- Jennifer MacPherson, Comstock Review Poets: Books and Chapbooks, Oct. 2007 ` Praise for Inside Light by Deborah DeNicola (available on amazon.com) This intensity of language serves DeNicola well throughout the book, as does her ability to combine the ancient with the modern – bathtubs with higher beings, molecules with “notes of Gregorian chant”. This grounding in the everyday saves the poems from being overly esoteric, although fortunately DeNicola also allows herself moments of true revelation. In “Last Judgment”, she writes of “those reliquaries deep in the solar plexus, / dousing the fiery fields where fear is eaten whole by risk.” Religious experience speaks to fear, and to fire, and to the sense that the physical body is both intrinsic and vulnerable to the heat. It is an impressive feat that this sense of peril is captured in nearly every poem in the collection. ` Praise for ALL THE WHILE by Catherine Abbey Hodges (available on amazon.com) "The language in these poems is unpretentious, unselfconscious, childlike but elegant too, and accurate . . . . Hodges' poems give that all-important illusion of having come to the page easily, naturally, perhaps because there is so much close attention to nature in them, and so much humanity." -- Judy Bebelaar, Midwest Book Review, Spring 2007 ` Praise for Fragrance Upon His Lips by Helen Marie Casey (available on amazon.com) "This gorgeously produced chapbook, with a floral-motif cover and a ribbon ties through the fold in the binding to make it look like a medieval psalter. None of the best-known renderings have been by women. I was interested in what role, if any, gender identity would play in Casey's rendering. It does have a role to play, but that role has more to do with Casey's choice of a literary antecedent than with her sensibility as a woman. The voice behind the voice would seem to be Anne Sexton." -- Stuart Peterfreund, The Worcester Review, Volume XXVII ` ` Praise for Larger Bodies Than Mine by Marianne Worthington--winner of the 2007 Appalachian Book of the Year Award for Poetry(available on amazon.com) "These poems inhabit dream hallways, trees, prophetic redbirds, and the stricken body of the poet's father from boyhood into the old age syncopation of his walker in the hall...her poems have the courage, the heart to touch the 'shiny dark' of the unknowable, fingering it like a buckeye, celebrating the luck of one poet's particular life. Howe wonderful to be taken with such sure poetic skill into larger bodies than our own." -- Appalachian Heritage, Winter 2007 ` Praise for The Stones by Celia Lisset Alvarez (available on amazon.com) Celia Lisset Alvarez, though, extracts maximum character and flavour from her Cuban American background, and the result is memorable, touching and always highly readable. ‘Flavour’ is the right word, too, because while family, roots and motherhood are the threads running through this well-paced collection, it’s often the highly sensual, occasionally synaesthetic imagery that really grabs you. You taste, smell and feel the Caribbean and Florida. -- Matt Merritt , Spinx 7 , 2007 I was deeply moved by the quality and unique light in which Alvarez’s poems are written. Her subjects are full of social and political import while still being deeply intimate and absorbing. Written from an obviously -- Melanie Mayo-Laa, www.motherverse.com |