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This book includes 21 pages of color photographs.

Land-locked, democratic Mongolia, sandwiched between two authoritarian superpowers (Russia and China), is a marvel, rich in history, culture, and natural beauty. This land of Genghis Khan still features herding nomads—of horses, cows, sheep, goats, camels, and yaks. Clearly, I was unprepared, and so will you be, as you follow my travel in that wonderful country. #mongolia, #ulaanbataar, #deerstones, #horseheadfiddle, #poetry

John Delaney retired after 35 years in the Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, where he was head of manuscripts processing and then, for the last 15 years, also curator of historic maps. He’s written a number of works on cartography, including Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific; First X, Then Y, Now Z: An Introduction to Landmark Thematic Maps; and Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888. These have extensive website versions. He’s been writing poems for most of his life, and, in the 1970s, attended the Writing Program of Syracuse University, where his mentors were poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth. In subtle ways, they have bookended his approach to poems. In 2017, John published Waypoints, a collection of place poems. Twenty Questions, a chapbook, appeared in 2019, and Filing Order: Sonnets and CATechisms, poems and photographs about his senior cat, came out in 2025. In addition, John has published a number of “poetic travel guides” based on his trips, often preferring remote, natural settings: Delicate Arch: Poems and Photographs of National Parks and Monuments (2022), Galápagos (2023), consisting of his son’s color photographs and John’s poetic responses, Nile (2024), poems and photographs about Egypt, and poems and photographs about Morocco (2026). He makes his home in Port Townsend, WA.

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CARBON FOOTPRINT walks the reader through experiences that trace our lives. Succinct reflections on birth, appetites, and COVID, rambling into fantasies about having a relationship with the voice of your car’s GPS and driving on crowded highways. Then pondering where that juicy steak came from and washing it down at a micro brew pub. There’s the mystery of parenthood, emergency room visits, and how social media shapes us and can’t forget us. CARBON FOOTPRINT is by turns quirky and concise, sardonic balanced with humor, with something for everyone. #poetry #family #life #technology #environment humor

After a career as a newspaper editor, Eric Chiles began teaching writing and journalism at colleges in eastern Pennsylvania. He is the author of What Was and Will Be (Resource Publications, 2024) and the chapbook Caught in Between (Desert Willow Press, 2019). His poetry has appeared in 3Elements Review, Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Pembroke Magazine, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2014 He completed a 10-year section hike of the Appalachian Trail.

CONGRATULATIONS TO AND FLP: David A. Porter’s new book Ghost Season (Finishing Line Press) is the WINNER of the Voyages of Verses Book Award: https://onetribune.one/onetribune-awards/ #awardwinner #awards #poetry #recommended #winner

Welcome to the OneTribune Awards! The OneTribune Awards celebrate the individuals, teams, and trailblazers who are redefining excellence acr

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: La Otra Cara by Dahlia Aguilar On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/la-otra-cara-by-dahlia-aguilar-nwvs-194/ La Otra Cara, a debut collection by Dahlia Aguilar, is a collection that plays with recollecting and forecasting the climate of our times. From barbed wire in the Rio Grande to children harvesting shad to revive the Anacostia River, her poems explore how the past binds us to the suffering of our ancestors as much as it links us to their brilliance and resistance. From poems coded with the DNA of oppression, to those imprinted with the music of loved ones, La Otra Cara rounds the soft melody of song and the rough edges of insult to birth the understanding of self. In her work memory opens one eye for what is lost and and the other for what lies ahead. In focus, her poems celebrate our nature as one of rebellion, resistance, and a map through. This book is for anyone rocked by the imbalance of our days and, despite all life’s messy endings, open to hope hard. #poetry #nature #Chicana #booktok Dahlia Aguilar is a Texas-born Chicana poet who has made her home in Washington, D.C. for over three decades. A DC Arts and Humanities Fellow and alum of Macondo and Under the Volcano, she writes between tenderness and defiance—where humor and ache share a cup of coffee and memory refuses to behave. Her poems appear in Naugatuck River Review, Acentos Review, Boundless, and the award-winning anthology Somos Xicanas. Her manuscripts “La Otra Cara” and “Tidal Range” have been finalists for national awards. She lives in Deanwood with her teenage son, two dogs, and menopause. @acocotli PRAISE: In this debut chapbook, Dahlia Aguilar takes us on a nuanced word voyage that begins before the womb and moves through childhood and memory into the fragile terrain between daughterhood and motherhood, weaving a tejido de emociones shaped by family, longing, grief, and survival. Through musings on abuse and forgiveness, colorism and border identity, Espanglish and music, La Otra Cara confronts war and politics, reminding us that “self-doubt is colonial” and that even in grief, we are seeds, becoming. Aguilar offers a fierce meditation on identity, love, and the act of remembering—one that feels urgently necessary for our time and that resonates long after the final page. –Ofelia Montelongo featured in The Rumpus, Latino Book Review, Los Acentos Review, and elsewhere; Macondista, 2019 Writer’s Center Fellow; PEN/Faulkner writer & PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow When you read a book of poems you want those poems to touch you, to make you feel. In Dahlia Aguilar’s La Otra Cara each poem is a hand that reminds you how necessary touch is, how much memory it can hold, how a shift in pressure will change the tone, take you from comfort to threat, from exploration to invasion. The poems in this book weave in and out of beauty, pain, pleasure and loss with ease, each one a place to stop, sometimes to rest, sometimes to fight but always to feel. –Samuel Miranda, artist, filmmaker and author of Protection from Erasure (Jaded Ibis Press), Departure (Central Square Press), and We Is (Zozobra Publishing); Executive Director of the American Poetry Museum From the colibrí to her son to the memorializing of lives lost to genocide, the speaker of these poems moves between pleasure and burden with “one foot on the ground, the next pointing toward a new place, another realm of less remembering.” These are poems of preparation—for battle, for a lover’s embrace—animated by an attention that will not turn away from injustice. “I want the emptiness of the forest / Not empty at all”—here is the crow’s caw, the sensual frenzy of insects, and the music of a voice that knows when to say no and when to say yes, yes, yes. —Dora Prieto of El Mashup Collective, 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers Please share/please repost #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook

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FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Another Word for Longing: Saudade by Melissa Scholes Young On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/another-word-for-longing-saudade-by-melissa-scholes-young-nwvs-196/ Another Word for Longing: Saudade traces a speaker’s immersion in Brazil as both an outsider and an intimate witness, guided by what poet David Keplinger calls “longing—the sense of loneliness incited by desire—in all of its disguises.” What begins as a travel narrative becomes something more interior and searching: a story of trying to belong in a place where the speaker is “a mere passer-through,” even as she wrestles with its language and textures its daily life with vivid, sensory attention. As poet Richard Peabody puts it, the book reads as “part travelogue, part love letter,” layered with discovery, language, and emotional risk. At its core, the collection follows a relationship shaped and sustained by longing—not only for place, but for the body and for continuity in the face of illness. The poems move through vulnerability and estrangement, echoing moments where the self feels fractured, as in the haunting admission, “Some mornings… I wake without my body.” This sense of dislocation deepens the intimacy between the two central figures, whose bond is strengthened by what Keplinger describes as “the lightning arc of true love that anchors and sustains.” Ultimately, this debut collection bends toward connection rather than resolution. Through small rituals and shared attention, longing becomes expansive rather than limiting. As poet Frank X Walker observes, these poems are “intimate… snapshots” that bring the reader close, honoring culture, language, and love without “asking why.” In this way, the collection transforms saudade into a sustaining force, an ache that widens into meaning, intimacy, and grace. #Poetry #Brazil #Longing #Place #LoveLetter Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novels Flood and The Hive. She received the Shelf Unbound Best Book Award in 2021 and the Next Generation Indie Book Award in 2023. She’s published two chapbooks of fiction, Scrap Metal Baby and Guinea Pig. Her poetry collection, Another Word for Longing: Saudade won 1st Honorable Mention in the New Women’s Voices series from Finishing Line Press. She served as Editor of Grace in Darkness, Furious Gravity, Grace in Love, and Grit & Gravity, anthologies by DC women writers. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Ms., Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Joyland, Brevity, and TheBeliever. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Tapestry, New Madrid, and Gargoyle. She’s received fellowships & grants from the Maryland Arts Council, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Carmargo Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Quarry Farm at Center for Mark Twain Studies, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A first generation college student from Hannibal, Missouri, she is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky.

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In Something Good in All That Darkness, the natural world isboth refuge and remedy. Whether it be on a mountain trail, beside a colony of blackbirds, or in a bundle of cumulous clouds gliding over a summer wedding, again and again Walker finds new ways of anchoring herself to the Earth’s splendor. In this debut chapbook, you’ll find playful imaginings as well as strength in the face of despair. These poems remind us that beauty exists even in the darkest of moments. #naturalworld #blackbirds #nature #naturepoetry #poetry booktok

Isabelle Walker lives in Santa Barbara, California, where she teaches and writes for magazine and newspapers. Her poems have appeared in December, The Maine Review, The Santa Barbara Literary Journal, The Sierra Nevada Review, Seven Hills Review, Salt, among others. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles. Something Good in All That Darkness is Walker’s debut chapbook. @isabelletwalker

A Poem by Isabelle Walker

https://paddockreview.com/2026/06/15/a-poem-by-isabelle-walker/ #poetry #nature #life #death #birds @isabelletwalker

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Eden is a book-length conversation with John Milton and the world he inhabited and envisioned in Paradise Lost, especially as that world is held up against the more complex realities of human existence. Drawing from history, art, literature, and science, and written in the blank verse Milton favored for his epic poems, Eden challenges us to consider who we are and what we might become if we fail to learn from the past. #poetry #history #environment #humanity #art epic FinishingLinePress ContemporaryPoetry PoetryLovers NewPoetry PoetryChapbook

Jon D. Lee is the author of four previous books, including IN/DESIDERATO and An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease. His poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative, Sugar House Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, One, The Laurel Review, and The Inflectionist Review. He has an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Folklore. Lee teaches at Suffolk University, where he also serves as Director of the annual David Ferry/Ellen LaForge Prize for Poetry and Translation. Visit jondlee.com. @jondeelee

New from Finishing Line Press: UPON THEM THE LIGHT SHINED by Matt Bialer On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/upon-them-the-light-shined-by-matt-bialer/ Everywhere in this new long poem by Bialer there is light: Orbs in the skies, at Lightscape in Brooklyn, on the Rockefeller Christmas tree and all over Fifth Avenue. And there’s the light in Handel’s classic oratorio MESSIAH. The title of this poem comes from a psalm in the piece where there’s a vast command of biblical narrative and imagery: A collection of quotations from the Old and New Testaments. Hallelujah, hallelujah. It’s the poet’s sixtieth birthday and holiday season since the poet’s wife died of breast cancer and he is determined that it will all be festive even though grief still lingers. He and his girlfriend light a candle in her memory at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. UPON THEM HATH THE LIGHT SHINED is a love letter to New York City and a celebration of the light of love. #poetry #poetsofinstagram #poetrylovers #dronesightings #UAP Matt Bialer is the author of more than two dozen books of poetry, including MAZE (Finishing Line Press), ALWAYS SAY GOODNIGHT (KYSO Flash), ASCENT (JournalStone) and THE VALLEY OF THE EIGHT and THIRD EYE OF THE INNER LIGHT (Leaky Boot Press) VIEW-MASTER LAND (Finishing Line Press), MATRIX (Saint Julian Press), andFANTASTIC VOYAGE (Stalking Horse Press). His poems have appeared in many print and online journals. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

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FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself by Catherine Arra On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/last-evening-with-all-the-versions-of-myself-by-catherine-arra/ Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself is a collection of poems in five sections. “Once Upon a Time” deals with childhood and coming of age through a reimagining of fairy tales. “Love is Dangerous” navigates the fault lines and terrain of loving. “Romancing the Other” explores the lineage and consequences of addiction. “A Double-Edged Sword” focuses on the nature of duality in ourselves and others. And finally, “New Skin” illustrates the resolution of conflicts the poet has experienced as a daughter, wife, ex-wife, lover, friend, and woman on her journey to a home within herself. The poems carry a universal theme of vacancy or hollowness as well as a yearning and search to arrive at wholeness. Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself is Arra’s tenth collection of poetry and revisits many themes and challenges she’s addressed in previous collections but now brings them to a place of personal acceptance and serenity. #women #poetry #feminism #art #childhood #illusion Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she facilitates local writing groups. A multiple Pushcart nominee, her poetry and prose have been published widely in literary journals online and in print, and in anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections and five chapbooks. Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself was first finalist in the Donna Palacio-Wolf Poetry Book Prize. She lives with poet and photographer Alex Stolis and their dog Daisy. Her website is www.catherinearra.com

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In The Last Things I’ll Remember, Randi Schalet writes from inside the long aftermath of her son’s death. These poems return to small, precise moments—a visit, something said or not said—and stay there, letting their weight accumulate.There is no resolution here. Addiction is present but not explained; grief is not softened or shaped into meaning. Schalet’s language is spare and exact. What emerges is a record of attention—a mother looking closely at what happened, and at what cannot be changed. In The Last Things I’ll Remember, Randi Schalet writes from inside the long aftermath of her son’s death. These poems return to small, precise moments—a visit, something said or not said—and stay there, letting their weight accumulate. There is no resolution here. The poems move through what remains: the habits of hope, the limits of what a parent can do, the ways a life narrows and continues. Addiction is present but not explained; grief is not softened or shaped into meaning. Schalet’s language is spare and exact. What emerges is a record of attention—a mother looking closely at what happened, and at what cannot be changed. #poetry #grief #addiction #loss #griefpoetry

Randi Schalet is a retired psychologist and writer based in Berkeley, California. Her work examines addiction, motherhood, regret, and the long afterlife of grief. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. This is her debut poetry collection. @randischalet1

A Poem by Randi Schalet

https://paddockreview.com/2026/06/12/a-poem-by-randi-schalet/

#poetry #life #death #grief #ashes

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In Village: Recession, Jo Pitkin explores the Great Recession of the early 2000s from the intimate vantage point of an American village, documenting the effects of this worldwide economic meltdown on friends, family, and neighbors—like the hardworking snow plower or the carpenter who never finishes his own house renovation in order to avoid paying higher property taxes—and on the poet herself. When the “recession’s serrated edge” profoundly alters her daily life, Pitkin finds temporary relief in small acts of kindness and solace in everyday encounters. Her poems not only capture the anxiety and isolation of being unexpectedly pushed out of the economic and, in turn, social mainstream but also convey with Dickinsonian detail the pleasures of ordinary experiences amidst the gradual contraction of her daily life. While tackling abrupt upheaval and contemplating how repercussions of economic cycles in history have shaped twelve generations of her family, Pitkin at last discovers the strength to endure. #poetry #GreatRecession #EconomicDownturn #Resilience #EconomicRecovery

Jo Pitkin is the author of a chapbook, The Measure, and three previous full-length collections: Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York; Commonplace Invasions; and Rendering. Currently a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn, she lives and works in New York’s Hudson River Valley at the river’s narrowest and deepest point. www.jopitkin.com

A Poem by Jo Pitkin

https://paddockreview.com/2026/06/11/a-poem-by-jo-pitkin/ #poetry #nature #sunlight

FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: They Spoke of the River by Judith Bowles On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/they-spoke-of-the-river-by-judith-bowles/ WINNER OF THE WILLIAM MEREDITH AWARD FOR POETRY Drawing from narrative traditions and influences such as Mary Oliver and James Wright—two beloved poets of Ohio—as well as the ghazals of Rumi and the plain-spoken wisdom of Robert Frost and William Stafford, poet Judith Bowles traces back the voices and oral histories of her Ohio roots, following the river of their words. Her third collection of poetry, They Spoke of the River is less memoir-in-verse than reliquary of the American experience, one which uses history, childhood, marriage, and elegy as rite and container. In the manner of Thornton Wilder’s stage manager in Our Town, here the past, present, and future fold over each other, as Bowles offers tough attention, all culminating in a volume that feels a bit like myth, a bit like news, and a bit like the dream of a life, experienced by one Ohioan, whose whole vocation has been this act of listening. #riverpoetry #ohiopoetry #narrativepoetry #midwesternpoetry #mindfulness Judith Bowles is the author of two earlier collections of poetry, The Gatherer (2014) and Unlocatable Source (2019). She has been a resident at Bloedel Reserve, Breadloaf, and the Kenyon Summer Writers Retreat, and she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from American University in 1986, studying under poet Myra Sklarew and novelist Kermit Moyer, later teaching creative writing in the department of English. From 1978 until 1985 Bowles was the poetry program director of the then Iona House, producing three anthologies featuring the work of participants. Her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Innisfree Journal of Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, Delmarva Review, and other journals.

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New from FLP: Between Merwin and Greger, Overtones of Poetry by Glenn D’Alessio On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/between-merwin-and-greger-overtones-of-poetry-by-glenn-dalessio/ Between Merwin and Greger, Overtones of Poetry is a reflective collection exploring memory, spirituality, ecology, music, and isolation as the result of unrequited love. Near the end it considers a dystopian future due to environmental destruction, yet ends on a brighter note. Its poetry is steeped in lyrical observation, and a contemplative poetic dialogue with former U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin and poet Debora Greger. After each poem’s title, there is an epigraph from one or the other of them, with the poems then moving between physical experience and inner consciousness, creating a world where symbolic perception and daily life overlap. Glenn D’Alessio creates a work that feels in tune with nature, and includes a social conscience; yet is attentive to the outer and inner worlds people inhabit. Readers are invited into a contemplative atmosphere where memory, imagination, love, loss, and the natural world echo through one another in unexpected ways. #LyricalNarrativePoetry #ContemplativeWriting #NatureWriting #EcologyGlobalWarming #GlennDAlessio Glenn D’Alessio is a carpenter, jazz flutist, and former college instructor in energy conservation and green building, incorporating environmental science into his teaching. His Finishing Line Press chapbooks include In My Sea Cliff Years of Innocence; A Carpenter’s Building, Homes for His Poems; and Some Tanka in Thanks to Elroy, Not the Most Cantankerous Dog. His poems have appeared in Sahara Journal, Cellar Roots, Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Borderlands, and Virgogray Press: Chapbook Edition. His awards include placements in Poetic Voices of America, the S. C. Robertson Memorial Contest, the Bushey Brothers Memorial Award, and an Honorable Mention in the Frank O’Hara Prize for a poem in The Worcester Review (2022). Website: glennpoetry.com PRAISE: It takes courage to sit at the feet of the masters: courage, humility, and an open heart. Glenn D’Alessio decided years ago that W. S. Merwin and Debora Greger were poets who might offer touchstones of instruction for him in his own work. Steeped in jazz and a master carpenter, D’Alessio — teacher, builder of homes, flutist in multiple jazz ensembles, has constructed a book of poems compelled by the imagery and language of both Merwin and Greger. Unafraid of the music of rhyme or the language of science, he creates a home echoing the ghost of each master. Between Merwin and Greger, Overtones of Poetry is a home of many rooms, each with its own central thematic joist. Open the door. Call out to the voices that live there. Enter. Listen. The conversation flows through the poems, rather than merely existing with them, emphasizing that the poems themselves are the language of dialogue. –Jonathan Blake, author of In the Kingdom These are bonsai poems: strong, delicate, subtle, ingenious, carefully crafted observations of individual moments in time and space, shaped by D’Alessio’s shrewd reading of two other poets, Debra Greger and W.S. Merwin, and his own “arcane chicanery” of wit, wordplay, and internal rhyme, making each word count to remind us that everything counts. –Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross. Please share/please repost #FLP #preorder #poetry #booktok

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What does it mean to live in our culture of spectacle and still find our humanity? In The Evening Championship, Masin Persina uses the stadium as both stage and metaphor to probe the violence that comes from our need to watch. But the collection seeks equally to explore the peripheral and tender: the scraps of old news articles, the remnants of a lost parent. Moving between public ritual and private grief with technical versatility and philosophical curiosity, Persina writes as both citizen and stranger, tracing the self as it navigates the ephemeral life that will not be archived—finding redemption, finally, in those dim moments away from the field lights, where we live with full consequence to those we love, “banking and blazing on repeat, downwind, all aflame.” #time #family #baseball #photography #death

Masin Persina lives in Richmond California with his wife and daughter. His first chapbook, Centonials, was published in 2024. Poems of his have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly, The Journal and elsewhere. He has received support from the Community of Writers as well as the UC Davis MFA program. An educator of 15 years, he serves as an instructional coach to English Language Arts teachers in an effort to ensure quality education for all students, regardless of their socio-economic status. @mepersina

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