Finishing Line Press

Congratulations John and FLP! John S. O’Connor was named a finalist for the 2026 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year contest for his book of poems, Streets & San (Finishing Line Press). #poetry #award #winner #finalist @oconnorais

Congratulations to Laura and FLP! Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death by Laura E. Garrard (Finishing Line Press) is a Finalist in the 23rd annual Best Book Awards in the category of Health: Cancer (American Bookfest) #books #poetry #cancer #awardwinner #awards @lauragarrard2016 Available where books are sold.

Finishing Line Press has no reading fee in November: finishinglinepress.submittab… #poetry #fiction #writers

New from Finishing Line Press: It’s All Here Somewhere by Christy Shepard   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   It’s All Here Somewhere offers a debut collection of poems that speak to the mysteries and messiness of daily life, as well as the challenge of staying present in the face of loss. With humor and compassion, these poems cover the gamut from a girl’s first period, through reckoning with infertility, adoption, single parenting, and love, to the uninvited ordeal of aging and the disappointments of the ever-changing body. The poet’s midwestern sensibilities ground these poems in the ordinary with extraordinary clarity and affection. #poetry  #motherhood  #loss  #aging  #love   Christy Shepard grew up in Minnesota and came to San Francisco in the early 70’s as a hippy, a feminist, and budding poet. After many decades in the helping professions as both a nurse and psychotherapist, she became an adoptive mother in her late 40’s, in her words “ever a late bloomer.” Her early experiences as an adoptive parent, as well as her deep love of the natural world, have shaped and infused her poetry. She has won honorable mentions in The MacGuffin Magazine and Bay Guardian Poetry Contests. Her work has been published in Persimmon Tree Literary Magazine, Local Gems Press, Celestial Arts Press, Manic D Press, and she won an annual Littoral Press Broadside contest. She is a long-time student of Kathleen McClung of The Writing Salon, and currently lives in Berkeley, CA.   PRAISE:   It’s All Here Somewhere by Christy Shepard explores the mysteries, heartaches, and, ultimately the joys and triumphs of a woman’s life from adolescence to old age, from infertility to adoption, from life to death. Shepard’s precise language will pierce your heart, even as you marvel at her skill at poetic form and compression. I will be turning to Shepard’s poems again and again. They are that good and that unforgettable. It’s All Here Somewhere, indeed. –Angie Minkin, author of  Balm for the Living and Lineage Songs (forthcoming)   Christy Shepard paints with words. “Two sets of long underwear hang on the line / by a broken shack with blue shutters / a single sign of Siberian life.” Who wouldn’t read poetry like this? Shepard evokes the natural world while plumbing the depths of her interior life. I was riveted from start to finish by her book’s intensity, tenderness, and imagery. –Martina Reaves, author of I’m Still Here   In this luminous collection, Christy Shepard confides in us readers—as in, she entrusts to our safekeeping, our care and protection, tender yet incandescent poems of “a child insomniac who welcomed morning,” a mother who holds close a keening daughter all afternoon, a neighbor unscrewing a jar of olives despite his tremor. These exquisite poems span regions and seasons—Minnesota winter light outside a hospital, summer heat on a Mendocino dock, rainfall in Siberia, the Northern Lights over Vermont—and each one meditates eloquently on our complicated humanity, on “the nature of donation/who gives, who receives.” Savor again and again the gift of Christy Shepard’s wise and steady poems, quietly bracing revelations, all of them “small promises against the dark night.” –Kathleen McClung, author of  Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies and Questions of Buoyancy Please share/please repost  #FLP #preorder #poetry #booktok #poetrytiktok

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… Fragile Intersect operates with the steady hand of an observer who knows the rhythm of the human heart—both its biological fragility and its emotional resilience. Drawing from thirty-six years specializing in cardiology at the bedside of Emergency Room, ICU, and Telemetry Units, Lynn Kincanon offers a rare clarity, seeking a respite for the soul through steadfast observation and sharp, detailed imagery. These poems serve as a sanctuary, inviting readers to find resonance in the quiet details of both the clinical landscape and the wild earth. The collection follows a semi-chronological arc, tracing a career spent standing witness at the threshold of life and death. Kincanon masterfully juxtaposes the intensity of the hospital room—the blood, the silence, and the weight of the medical “sentry”—with the organic softness of the natural world. Nature poems act as a rhythmic pacing, providing essential respite from the high-stakes pulse of the ward. Whether observing the moon, feeding the bees, or the skeletal beauty of bare branches, Kincanon suggests that everything—from the human pulse to the soil—possesses its own consciousness. Recurring motifs of herons, wolves, and graves serve as reminders that the transition from life to death is universal—one that is ultimately traveled alone yet can be met with peace and “wild abandon.” At its core, Fragile Intersect is a contribution to the established Medical Humanities and emerging field of Lyric Medicine. It is a vital exploration of healing, trauma, and the transition from a life of service to the freedom of retirement. By the final poem, the author has begun her own “transformation from autumn’s color to whiteness,” leaving the reader with a profound sense of gratitude for the journey traveled. #Medical #Poetry #WomenPoets #NaturePoetry #Ecopoetry @lynnkincanon Lynn Kincanon is a poet of steadfast observation whose work pulses with “lyrical lifeforce energy.” As the Poet Laureate of Loveland, Colorado Emerita  (2022–2025), she is a defining presence in the contemporary poetry scene of Northern Colorado, recognized for a style that balances nature-infused imagery with profound emotional resonance. Her writing offers a rare clarity informed by a distinguished thirty-six-year career in nursing and as a Nurse Practitioner specializing in cardiac care, allowing her to monitor the human heart through a dual lens of clinical precision and soulful evocativeness. A dedicated mentor and collaborator, Lynn is the author of two chapbooks, Evocation, and Art as Metaphor, Analogy and Allegory (self-published 2013) and the forthcoming collection, Fragile Intersect (Finishing Line Press 2026).  @lynnkincanon   Website: lynnkincanon.com

A Poem by Lynn Kincanon paddockreview.com/2026/11/02… #poetry #life #hospital @lynnkincanon

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Clean Getaway by Micah J. Ruelle On SALE: finishinglinepress.com/produ… In their second chapbook, Clean Getaway, Micah Ruelle traces the volatile architecture of romantic desire — its momentum, its pauses, its returns. These poems dwell in the in-between: the almost confessions, the charged silences, and the tender miscalculations. Refusing the shape of a cautionary tale, what emerges in these pages is a portrait of love not as destination, but as practice — messy, persistent, and quietly redemptive. This manuscript was named a finalist or semifinalist in five national chapbook competitions, including the 2023 Vinyl Chapbook Competition for YesYes Books, the 2024 Nine Syllables Press Chapbook Competition, and the 2025 Concrete Wolf Competition. #cleangetaway #lovewins #getawaycar Micah Ruelle is a queer educator, editor, writer, community art organizer, youth advocate, and poet from America’s Heartland. Their first chapbook, Failure to Merge, was published by Finishing Lines Press in 2019. PRAISE: Micah Ruelle’s Clean Getaway guides us through kitchen tableaux, raucous Pride night dance floors, Texas backroads, and beyond to honor what’s transformative within the messy, often temporary nature of romantic love. It explores what it means to be a feeling human animal often at the mercy of the “Moneypeople” of late capitalism. This is a collection of whole-hearted poems that “Praise the sun, the great bowl. / The great yawning lack, the ever-emptying cup.” Ruelle’s poems keep the engine running while they name and then release whatever has been othered inside and outside the self. –Paula Cisewski.“I am really tired of trying/ to make this thing work” opens Micah Ruelle‘s passionately forthright Clean Getaway, the speaker taking us alongside the passages of tragedy and miracle, in which “I could only whimper gratitude/in a lose English” in the midst of finding “Armageddon arrived, heaven & hell/ in their final brawl.” Deeply personal and meticulously crafted, Ruelle’s poems capture what we often cannot answer but explore anyway, whether on a cargo ship “casting off from the dock/ you will never stand on” or from the vantage point of Texas’s Enchanted Rock. These are the necessary conversations we must have in times of no return, even when trapped and full of doubt, for the very reason “I always manage to start building a house outside the cave, just to be near you.”–Rosebud Ben-Oni .Micah Ruelle’s smart and moving chapbook Clean Getaway is an exploration of how past relationships find form in narrative. And even though many of the situations the book recounts are, in their moments, emotionally difficult and complex, Clean Getaway finally serves as a profound assertion of value—since love is “origin,” since the past eventually becomes meaning, and since, above all else, there’s sustaining power in saying, “I was I was I was.” –Wayne Miller Please share/please repost #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… Color Blind is a poetry collection that traces the shared bloodlines between racism, gun violence, and war, revealing them as one unbroken human wound. Each poem bears witness to lives cut short, communities fractured, and histories repeating themselves under different names and flags. The poems in this collection refuse the comfort of distance or justification, insisting that violence is never contained—it always returns. Color Blind asks readers to look beyond borders, politics, and skin color, and to sit with the shared grief that remains, calling for remembrance, reckoning, and a clearer way of seeing.#GunViolence #War #Racism, #SharedGrief, #BearingWitness Rana Bitar is a Syrian-American physician, poet, and writer. She holds a Master’s in creative writing from SNHU. She is the author of a memoir, The Long Tale of Tears and Smiles ( Global Collective Publishers, 2021), two poetry chapbooks, A Loaf of Bread (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and Hold Your Breath (Unsolicited Press, 2023), and a translated poetry book, Love and Resistance (Fernwood Press, 2025). Her poetry and essays appeared in many journals, including The New York Times and AGNI. Ranabitar.com@RanaBitarBooks

A Poem by Rana Bitar paddockreview.com/2026/10/30… #poetry #life

FLP POETRY BOOK in TRANSLATION:   Dove La Luce/Where the Light: A Selection of Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1919-1969 by Wally Swist   Order here:   finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Giuseppe Ungaretti received initial praise for his first book, L’Allegria, written in the trenches of WWI.  After the war, he returned to Paris, where he found friendships before the conflict, with such historical literary personages as philosopher Henri Bergson and later upon his return with Hungarian surrealist poet, Tristan Tzara, a significant meeting of minds.  He became a part of the academy in Italy but lived in Argentina, until his son’s death, and came back to Italy, in which he lived in during WWII.  His “later poems” after L’Allegria—some five decades worth—intensely address the natural world, relationships and sensuality, the difficult memories of childhood, and remnants of his searing experiences in war.  There is a sense of reading a poet worthy of being on the world stage.  Actually, Ungaretti and Nobel Laureat Eugenio Montale are often thought of as Italy’s two major poets.  Essentially, Ungaretti is an imagist, but his images are affected in a surrealist manner, uncommon in their intensity, but not without a memorable lyricism and haunting juxtaposition.  A poet’s work is sometimes described as being “lasting” in that it can be reread often.  In this, Ungaretti’s poems, and this selection of the ones which this translator thought to represent, exhibit his “lasting” work — in the tones and depths of an incisive poetry whose resonance is nothing less than being described as perpetuating.  These translations were made over a period of some five years after the translator first came upon Ungaretti’s work when he was twenty, over five decades ago.  His intent is to share how he has seen and heard Ungaretti’s poetry appear to him on the page and sounded to him in his ear.  As with all translations, it is a work of inspiration, guidance, deep reading, and devotion. #translations #poetry #Ungaretti   Author of more than forty collections of poetry and prose, Wally Swist’s new books include Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, and If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press). Recent poems, essays, and translations have or will appear in Anomaly, Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Consequence, Healing Muse, Image Journal, Pensive, The Plentitudes, and Your Impossible Voice. Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was selected by Yuseff Komunyakaa as co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. Readings of Swist’s poems are archived on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and NPR. His previous book of translations of the poetry of Giuseppi Ungaretti, L’Allegria, written in the trenches of WWI, was published by Shanti Arts (2023). Please share/please repost  #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt  #poetry #translation

Congratulations! David W. Berner’s book Garden Tools: Poems (Finishing Line Press) is a finalist for Book of the Year award from the Chicago Writers Association for Poetry. #poetry #awardwinning #books #booktok

New from Finishing Line Press: Sing Vanquished, Sing Victorious by Ruth Mota   On SALE: finishinglinepress.com/produ…      Sing Vanquished, Sing Victorious by Ruth Mota is a 63-page collection of poems drawn from images and experiences of the author’s life. The volume is divided into sections that cover growing, residence in the mountains and by the sea, dream and garden-scapes, as well as her work-life in HIV prevention throughout Latin America and Africa. It concludes with reflections on departing. #poetry  #sealife  #AIDS   Ruth Mota currently lives in Santa Cruz, California where she devotes herself to writing poetry after a career as an international health trainer. Besides writing verse, she also enjoys facilitating poetry circles to groups in her community like veterans, elders and men in jail. Over sixty of her poems have been published in online and print journals and one was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sing Vanquished, Sing Victorious is her first book of verse. Her chapbook Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed was recently released by Finishing Line Press.   PRAISE:   Sing Vanquished, Sing Victorious is an intimate and expansive collection that weaves strands of Ruth Mota’s life and learning together with lush language and voracious emotion that dares readers to “dream a time that was young with hunger” (Beloved, When I Think of You). Mota crafts for us a precocious child and her wily collie, Shek and brings us through “cities starting with the letter ‘M’ that had a million population” (Summer Blossom). We are treated to vivid and acute observations of the sensual and scientific, like the atlas moth who lives “without regret or shame or any moral compass.” In “Through the Telescope,” we are asked to ponder “from planet to universe, how mammoth is this dying?” while “Letter to a Fellow Survivor” begs “let us squeeze every drop of juice from this life.” Mota’s poems are a worldmap “where gross nationals are measured in happiness, not products” (Travel Is). It is a delightful, delicious, and deftly crafted followup to her chapbook Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed. With Mota’s words, you are in good hands. –Hannah Tool, author of A Caved in Woman   Please share/please repost  #FLP #preorder #poetry #booktok #poetrytiktok

heightsobserver.org/articles… #News #poetry #books

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… Edited by John Philip Drury @druryjp Gerald Busby’s rollicking and ruminative memoir, Getting Saved: Coming Out as a Gay Man and a Composer, chronicles his adventurous, dramatic life, its tragedies and comedies, starting with his birth in Texas during the Great Depression and his growing up as a piano prodigy and gay adolescent in a Southern Baptist family. He attends Yale, where he studies music and philosophy, coming out as a gay man. After adventures in New York City and traveling as a college textbook salesman out west, he realizes that he’s a composer and devotes his life to that mission, composing Runes for Paul Taylor’s dance company and the haunting score for Robert Altman’s 3 Women. Virgil Thompson helps Gerald and his partner, Sam Byers, find an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, but in a few years both men are diagnosed HIV-positive and Sam dies of AIDS. Gerald overcomes his grief, despair, and drug addiction and resumes composing, learning the Sibelius notation program and presenting his music, including fifty string quartets, through concerts, a CD, and Facebook posts of his scores and audio. He continues to live in the Chelsea Hotel.Hashtags: #GayMemoir #FilmScoring #RobertAltman #NewYorkCity #ChelseaHotel Gerald Busby was born in Texas in 1935. A piano prodigy who grew up in a Southern Baptist family, he performed with the Houston Symphony when he was 15 and attended the Yale School of Music, graduating in 1960, two years after coming out as a gay man. His best known compositions are Runes, commissioned for a ballet by Paul Taylor, and the score for Robert Altman’s film 3 Women. He moved into the Chelsea Hotel with Sam Byers, the love of his life, in 1977. After Sam died of AIDS, Gerald fell apart, gradually recovering and resuming his vocation as a composer. He continues to live in the Chelsea Hotel. @busbygerald

Chapter from his memoir, Getting Saved: Coming Out as a Gay Man and a Composer by Gerald Busby paddockreview.com/2026/10/29… #memoir #music #composer #lbgtqcommunity

FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Cowgirl by Karol Nielsen   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Karol Nielsen’s mother grew up in Nebraska where she rode horses with her friend Kathy O’Brien and drove cattle down a dirt road with her father. She was a cowgirl, barrel racer, go-kart designer, cheerleader, and champion swimmer.  After she married her high school sweetheart, she became a computer programmer, business owner, world traveler, Sunday School teacher, mother, and grandmother. She and her husband wrote letters to each other almost every day while he served in the Vietnam War. She spent most of her adult life in Connecticut where she raised her three children, started her own computer support company, and joined her husband on business trips all around the world. Cowgirl is a tribute to her colorful life full of wisdom, adventure, love, and laughter. #cowgirl #horses #poetry #family #life   Karol Nielsen is the author of the memoirs Raising the Price of the House (Finishing Line Press), Walking A&P (Mascot Books), and Black Elephants (Bison Books), and three poetry chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press. Her first memoir, Black Elephants, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in nonfiction, with excerpts honored as notable essays in The Best American Essays. Her new poetry collection, Cowgirl (Finishing Line Press), was a semifinalist for the 2025 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her poetry was also a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry and the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, North Dakota Quarterly, Permafrost, and elsewhere.   PRAISE:   Cowgirl unfolds one woman’s unique story lassoed by the love and poetic talent of her daughter. Nielsen uses traditional stanzas to pen in everyday details while the main character, her mother, rides and roams the landscapes of life – childhood, marriage, motherhood, travel, and career. By the end of the collection, you’ll wish you had met Karol Nielsen’s mother in person but will be grateful you had the chance to meet her through her daughter’s poetic lens. -Dawn Leas, author of I Know When to Keep Quiet, Take Something When You Go, A Person Worth Knowing, and The Sin of Being.   If horses didn’t know better than humans, we might not have this wonderful collection called Cowgirl. In it, Karol Neilsen keeps the language horse-simple and the emotional arc gigantic. The geography, too: from the Nebraska plains to helicopter landing fields in Vietnam and a whole lot of stuff in between. Saddle up, hold on, and enjoy the ride. –Tim Tomlinson, author of Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World    Please share/please repost   #booktok #poetry #FLP #book

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… Jenny Moyer’s halfway invites the reader to consider the transient fragments of life during the most universal emotions – grief, love, and longing. This collection of brief poems crystalizes the disruption of life by grief as it focuses on the small moments throughout the nonlinear journey of healing. Mixing a larger shared human experience with Moyer’s personal struggle, halfway navigates the winding path through the overwhelming to the endurable, acknowledging the lingering state of being halfway healed. #grief #healing #poetry #moments #noticethesmallthings Jenny Moyer lives in North Carolina’s High Country with her spouse and three dogs. She enjoys reading, music, daydreaming, and spending time in nature. halfway is Jenny’s first chapbook, but although she is just beginning her publishing journey, she has been scribbling for years and holds a B.A. in English Literature. @321jennyjenny

A Poem by Jenny Moyer paddockreview.com/2026/10/28… #poetry #sunset #nature @321jennyjenny

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… Dear Spokane River I Love You contains surprise, sadness, what happens when we get together, clubs, and write that down lines. Last week, I took a photo series between my favorite two places on the Spokane River, the blue bike and Spiral Beach, which inexplicably had an abandoned boat full of trash on the street, which perfectly captured my overall theme of finding contrast in art and trash, and placing myself in the middle of absurdity. Today, I went back to see it in a different light. It was gone. Dear Spokane River I Love You is a poetry collection about trash and water. It’s also about hearts. It lives in the confluence of whimsy and rage. #poetry #Spokane #trash #water #hearts Erin Schmidt is a writerly artist librarian educator who often blends story, advocacy and heart in her writing. She usually makes tiny illustrated books for her friends, lists of collected lines, and often writes only in titles. Her work explores hearts, hot dogs, raccoons, contrasts, art and beauty, the Spokane River and trash. You can find her work in Pictures of Poets, Poetry Moment, Lilac City Local, various student-produced publications, and in anonymous art around town. Dear Spokane River I Love You is her first book of poetry. She currently lives in Spokane, Washington with her family.