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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Orgone Accumulator by Andre F. Peltier On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/orgone-accumulator-by-andre-f-peltier/ Orgone Accumulator is a collection of poetry that dealing with the personal, the political, and the space between the two. These poems use humor to convey the serious issues of the day while using stoic seriousness to mask the silly aspects of life and nostalgia. Throughout this collection, readers find moments of reflection and a deep love for the minutia of life while simultaneously joining Peltier in questioning the preconceived notions of what poetry can be. #poetry #nostalgia #environment #politics Andre F. Peltier (he/him) is a Pushcart and two time Best of the Net nominated poet and a Senior Lecturer at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches literature and writing. He lives in Ypsilanti, MI, with his wife and children. His poetry has recently appeared in various publications both online and in print. His previous poetry collections include Poplandia, Ambassador Bridge, Trouble on the Escarpment, and Petoskey Stones. In his free time, he obsesses over soccer, gardening, and comic books. www.andrefpeltier.com Bluesky: andrefpeltier.bsky.social PRAISE FOR Orgone Accumulator by Andre F. Peltier “Andre Peltier takes us into a world where memories become surreal explorations of history, mythology, and culture. Orgone Accumulator oscillates between humor, nostalgia, and existential reflection; keeping readers engaged with themes that seem to resonate more with each passing year. Peltier guides you, as you wander through landscapes and philosophies, where every journey tells a story and every story celebrates the art of storytelling.” –Lisa Bennington-Love, author of Love Letter and Suicide Notes “In Orgone Accumulator, Andre Peltier‘s poetry moves between traveling through landscapes and the emotional aspects of family life. He’s at his strongest when these two come together, like when a child becomes a cactus in the dunes and both helplessness and fierce love are revealed. Hidden in the nostalgia are moments written with tenderness and specificity.” –Felicia MacArthur, author of I Used to Know You Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry

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FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: In the Tilling by Donna Isaac

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/in-the-tilling-by-donna-isaac/

In the Tilling revels in the bounties of #earth and #sea, the culinary arts, past and present living. Isaac transports her readers into realms of childhood, landscapes north and south, reflecting on #family, #food, and modern challenges. Remembering, musing, and, at times, amusing, the writer has crafted a contemplative collection rich with imagery and lyricism. #poetry #earth #sea #culinaryarts #life #family #food #childhood #friendship

After earning English degrees from James Madison University, Virginia, and the University of Minnesota, Donna Isaac received her MFA from Hamline University in 2007 where she was awarded Best Poetry Thesis for her capstone, Sustenance. She taught English and writing in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, retiring from full-time work after 40 years. She continues to work with community poetry through the League of MN Poets. Published work includes chapbooks: Tommy (Red Dragonfly Press); Holy Comforter (Red Bird Chapbooks); and Persistence of Vision (Finishing Line Press) and a poetry book, Footfalls (Pocahontas Press). Her writing appears in various journals including the Penn Review, The Saint Paul Almanac, and others. <donnaisaacpoet.com>

PRAISE FOR In the Tilling by Donna Isaac:

Donna Isaac‘s new collection of poems takes us along on a journey to her childhood. Liberally laced with food she grew to love from avocados to blue crab to artichokes, the book is a literal feast (yes, recipes are included!) that takes the reader back to their own roots. Each poem is like a slice of freshly baked pie, evoking time, place, and people of luscious newness. This is a book to dip into and savor—an afternoon treat that enchants you. It’s a treat that beckons you back for another and yet another taste–tart, sweet, and deeply satisfying.

–Stanley Kusonoki, author of Shelter in Place, Items in the News

“The soul can be fertile like loam,” Donna Isaac writes in In the Tilling. The book retraces a childhood in the South in poems so deliciously detailed you can taste the fresh-caught crab and hear the football games. Fear of leaping into a swimming hole resonates with a fear of leaping into young adulthood. Amidst loved ones’ aging, her own aging, and the breath of a Minnesota winter, readers will also hear a “red-tailed hawk rising like a song” and see “incarnadine sumac aflame on the edge of the road.”

–Janna Knittel, author of Real Work, finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award

“In the Tilling is a powerful collection, a delight to read–lush, with an upbeat voice, curious, observant of the world of foods, plants, and the life of ancestors, childhood, friends. The book is very lyrical, fluid, wonderfully clear and written with great liveliness.”

–Margaret Hasse, author of The Call of Glacier Park, Summoned and five other books of poetry.

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In the Tilling by Donna Isaac – Finishing Line Press

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FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Self-Portraits Ex Machina by Devi S. Laskar

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/self-portraits-ex-machina-by-devi-s-laskar/

Self-Portraits Ex Machina features poems that explore contemporary American life, immigrant family folklore and mistranslations; racism, misogyny, model minority myths and being othered. The poems are housed in various forms and experiential detail to create narratives that address love and loss, family history, tragedy and success, old wounds gleaned from memory’s lens – and the joy of everyday life chores, such as cooking. Time stops for a while as the poems come alive and the stories unfold. #poetry #memory #immigrant #India #Bengali #racism #life #American

Devi S. Laskar is a poet, novelist, artist, photographer, former newspaper reporter and lifelong Tar Heel. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks; and her debut poetry collection, Self-Portraits Ex Machina is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Laskar is the author of the award-winning novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, and recently, Circa. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War is forthcoming from Mariner Books (2026). Her debut spoken-word album is forthcoming from Someplace Called Brooklyn record label later this year. She holds degrees from Columbia University, University of Illinois and UNC-Chapel Hill. She now lives in California.

PRAISE FOR Self-Portraits Ex Machina by Devi S. Laskar

In this dazzling and potent collection, Devi S. Laskar fuses memory with rage, turning hunger into vengeance, carving form into beauty as well as tragedy. These poems render personal history as haunting revelations of body, mind, and spirit, carrying urgent messages that demand to be heard.

–Elizabeth Rosner, author of THIRD EAR and SURVIVOR CAFE.

Self-Portraits Ex Machinais a searing collection that dispenses thunder and lightning through its poems. Divine intervention is replaced by human resilience, strength, ingenuity and vulnerability. Through innovative haibuns, contrapuntal poems and other experimental forms, Devi Laskar’s work encompasses everything from burning crosses and Klan rallies to powerful meditations on motherhood, marriage, and food that carry the weight of cultural memory. Her poems document American racism with razor sharp precision while transforming that documentation into art, as in “Restaurant Queue Contrapuntal” where prejudice at a hostess stand becomes a two-voiced fury of resistance. Memory is a dizzying kaleidoscope in Laskar’s work—reassembling and taking apart moments of trauma and triumph. The plaintive cries to “God” that echo throughout her poems become testament to human persistence in the face of institutional failure. This is a necessary book for our times, bearing witness to self-reliance when systems meant to protect and help fall short.

–Shikha Malaviya, Author of Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems

Devi S. Laskar‘s luminescent Self-Portraits Ex Machina is a feast in the physical and spiritual sense. Laskar allows her readers to embark on a poetic voyage complete with intellectual meditations on English syntax, observations on victuals offered at vacation Bible camps, and honest recollections of the perils of intergenerational recipe translation. Masterfully injecting nuance into every verse, Laskar’s poems transcend bodily experiences and cultural divides, drawing on myriad previously established traditions—whether retelling ancient Greek myths or satirizing whitewashed country music. Self-Portraits also encourages a higher level of engagement from its readers, boasting interactive poems in the style of both Mad Libs and bricolage chaotically coordinating popular newspaper headlines. The result is a singularly immersive literary adventure, one that asks much of its readers, and delivers even more. In the world she weaves, tapestries of cultural critique and personal outlook deliver a collection that demands lingering with one’s own biases while simultaneously facilitating the abolishment of the boundaries that enable them.

—Ewa Chrusciel, the author of Yours, Purple Gallinule and three other books.

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#book #read #poems #memory #immigrant #India #Bengali #racism #life #American

Self-Portraits Ex Machina by Devi S. Laskar – Finishing Line Press

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Ruin Me Before the Party Ends by Chloe Rodriguez

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/ruin-me-before-the-party-ends-by-chloe-rodriguez/

Ruin Me Before the Party Ends is a sharp, intimate exploration of memory, identity, and the ghosts we carry from past loves and forgotten places. Through a series of vivid and surreal odes, the collection delves into the tangled landscapes of love, longing, and the personal histories that shape us. With wit and vulnerability, the poems invite readers into a world that balances the chaotic energy of youthful rebellion with the quiet ache of growing up. From the neon glow of Miami’s forgotten dive bars to the haunted swamps of Florida, each poem is a search for meaning in the spaces that elude us—whether in the fleeting pleasure of a fast-food quesadilla, the fading memory of dive bars and strip clubs, or the tender grief of a mother’s absence. Ruin Me Before the Party Ends is an invitation to a party where nostalgia, loss, and the desire for connection are all tangled together, and where the end always feels just around the corner, with each poem a desperate attempt to hold on before it all slips away. #poetry #memory #identity #loss #place #love #belonging #womanhood #girlhood #Florida

Chloe Rodriguez is a poet, writer, and a South Florida Native. Chloe has a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Philosophy from Florida International University. She is currently an MFA candidate for Creative Writing with a focus in poetry at Florida State University, where she is also a Graduate Teaching Instructor.

PRAISE FOR Ruin Me Before the Party Ends by Chloe Rodriguez

Through lushly rendered descriptions, compelling lyricism, and a stark awareness, these poems masterfully tour us through life’s varied and complex landscapes: the natural and the urban, childhood and womanhood, the visceral and the spiritual, the romantic and the profane, innocence and decadence.

–Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body

Chloe Rodriguez’s Ruin Me before the Party Ends is a wild invitation to one “manic pixie dream girl’s” riot of color, lights, and dive bars, and through it all, she asks “What is it be a woman?” A little girl sees the pink neon sign for a pole dancing club. Is that it? A late-night deejay, Delilah, hands out romantic advice. Should we take it or is it just another trick? Are we all as lost as Laika in the outer reaches of the cosmos? Or are we post-pop princesses ready “to hang up the combat boots?” There are so many women inside one woman, and Chloe Rodriguez has invited them all to her party. A rock ‘n’ roll debut!

–Barbara Hamby

Chloe Rodriguez‘s poems resonate with both large personal and Americana iconograghy. Her poems zing and sing with tremendous energy. They are beautifully crafted and elegant on the page. Her voice is unmistakable and resonates with gusto and bravado. Congratulations on her entrance to the church of American poetry, a much welcomed and brilliant debut!

–Virgil Suarez

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Ruin Me Before the Party Ends by Chloe Rodriguez – Finishing Line Press

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NEW FROM FLP: Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire by C. Henry Smith

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/twenty-four-covers-of-a-house-on-fire-by-c-henry-smith/

24 Covers… is a sweeping, chapbook-length poem of “startling and gorgeous” language, capturing dispatches from a speaker “stunningly adrift in capitalism, mourning a rootlessness or a distance from problematic roots.” The apostrophic work obsesses over the landscape of home—the physical landscape, the emotional landscape—on our private folklores, and on those rituals we cannot escape. It is at once a meditation on cows and then a meditation on the infinite incarnations of the body, on the practice of living while saturated in longing, and on the symbols and sins that make us who we are. Across the twenty-four sections, the author charts desire, hauntology, anxiety, and the relationship of self to an imagined past, utilizing lines that stretch past the page and a swirl of unlikely images that reach across the canyons, avenues, and dreamscape houses of the poem. This is a sonically rich and decidedly original achievement from a writer who sees sensations and emotions simultaneously occurring outside of the strictures of memory, language, and time. #poetry #longing #texas #selfhood #faith

C. Henry Smith is the author of the poetry chapbooks Warren (Ghost City Press) and Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire (Finishing Line Press), and his Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated work has appeared in Colorado Review, DMQ Review, Psaltery & Lyre, LIT, and others. He received his BA at St. Edward’s University and his MFA at Oregon State University, and he is grateful for past residencies through Spring Creek Project and Chicago Art Department.

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Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire by C. Henry Smith – Finishing Line Press

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FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Second Sight by Daryl Hafter

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/second-sight-by-daryl-hafter/

The #poems in Second Sight explore the #world of #nature as it speaks to us, enjoying, questioning, and complaining in our shared earthly home. We hear the moaning of a tree being cut down, and the ecstasy of wind-tossed Autumn branches. We learn to bear grief through the screen of mountain forests. But our lived experience goes beyond material things. My adult Bat Mitzvah opened questions. I had new ways of thinking about #Creation and #humanity. I wondered, Why do we have a flawed universe? What is our role in “Tikun Olam”—repairing the world? These poems present glimpses into the rich and full #life surrounding us all.

A poet and historian, Daryl Hafter has published three books on women in eighteenth-century France, with the support of the American Philosophical Society and the National Science Foundation. She has a B.A. from Smith College and a Ph.D from Yale University. Her life-long poetry writing was inspired by growing up in a rural Utopian community called Free Acres. Her home now is Ann Arbor, Michigan.

PRAISE FOR Second Sight by Daryl Hafter

Daryl Hafter‘s poetry is universal and personal and her subjects go far and wide—- a walk in the neighborhood, a tree which has become a friend, a woman fleeing during Exodus from Egypt–a dialogue with herself about the existence of a divinity, the pleasure of reading scriptures, the contradiction of religious belief, doubt. Diverse subjects, always treated with wit and humor.

–Clare Goldfarb, Fmr Chair, English Department, Western Michigan University

In this collection of wonderful poetry, the story each one tells with vivid visual imagery immediately captures the reader’s attention. The writing is direct and powerful, the language is chosen for impact as well as beauty, and the underlying structure is strong. Poems such as the stunning Consolation are unforgettable.

–Monica Starkman, MD, University of Michigan

Daryl Hafter‘s “Second Sight” is a poetic journey through time past as it is given new life in the present, and as a historian, she is well qualified to take such an approach.

There is a sense of spiritual unity in these poems about daily life touched by nature, beautifully illustrated both by the words and the paintings that accompany them.

–Bette W. Oliver, Ph.D., Poet and historian, University of Texas at Austin

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Second Sight by Daryl Hafter – Finishing Line Press

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Native Language by Michael Beebe

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/native-language-by-michael-beebe/

Native Language is a book of #sonnets. The #poems tend to settle into the mind easily, with some grace and usually some mystery. The topics are from #life, of course – human life, its issues and puzzles. Most readers will find some or several poems that speak to them; we are so much alike, really. The #natural #world is the backdrop and always a powerful presence. Still, it is the human world we live in. The author was trained as a philosopher but became a CPA to earn a living and this odd combination perhaps offers a useful way to read the poems.

Michael Beebe earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and then became a CPA to earn a living. He came to poetry later in life, when sometime in mid-life he found poetry was the only thing he could read, nothing else suitably serious, beautiful and truth-apt all together. Sometime then he began to try to write poetry of his own. He now lives with his wife in retirement in the Portland, Oregon area. He reads philosophy and poetry and works at his writing. This is his eightieth year; he is now reading the poet Stanley Moss to learn how to be very old.

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https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/native-language-by-michael-beebe/

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: DHARMA’S DANCE by Christine Poythress

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/dharmas-dance-by-christine-poythress/

In Dharma’s Dance, Christine Poythress‘s debut collection, she traces her journey in search of #love or a Mr. Right from the repressive #South to her free-loving twenties in 1970s California, and to New York, culminating with the wisdom of age and a sense of where the soul resides. Or as Poythress writes, “This life, the only one we perceive, isn’t everything, so I believe.” This New Age collection is at once serious, filled with wit, and grounded in the mystical. #life #poetry #chapbook #relationships #travel #searching

Christine Poythress grew up singing in church, school, and with her mama. She left the South in pursuit of a music career, and while in California, she began journaling and scribbling poems in the margins of her drawings. She was a folkie until she discovered opera, which propelled her to New York where she studied by day and was a singing waitress by night. In 1979 and 1980, she was a National Anthem Guest Soloist, at Madison Square Garden, for the New York Knicks and Rangers. After moving back to the South, she sang on the southeastern club and hotel circuit performing a combination of jazz standards, top forties, pop, and country music. In 1993, she returned to college and classical singing, becoming a frequent recitalist at universities and a soloist with regional orchestras. Since 2014, she has studied creative writing with award-winning author, Rosemary Daniell and has focused on writing poetry, memoir, and essays. Her work has appeared in Quillkeepers Press, Tangled Locks Journal and Synchronized Chaos.

PRAISE FOR DHARMA’S DANCE by Christine Poythress

Christine Poythress‘s poems in her debut chapbook, Dharma’s Dance, are a delightful mix of the ethereal, the mystical and the witty. Indeed, her work is truly unique, and I for one will look forward to anything she writes in the future, as I imagine will be her many, many readers to come.

–Rosemary Daniell, award-winning author of The Murderous Sky: Poems of Madness and Mercy, and nine other books of poetry and prose.

“The speaker as ingenue who pockets concrete wisdom from illusory love affairs, as vibrant, artistic woman and mother who grows to find the generational hand-me-downs of family precious, as wiser-woman looking back, Dharma’s Dance is a recursive moving closer to the place where the soul resides – the poet says, “This life, the only one we perceive, isn’t everything, so I believe” – to a grounding in the eternal. I finish the book feeling the emerging of a deep and soul-searching self, individuated yet continuous with life and its beyond, and am moved to remember lines from The Song of Amergin: “I am a wonder among flowers…I am a breaker threatening doom…I am a hill where poets walk…I am the tomb of every hope.”

–Steven Croft, author of At Home with the Dreamlike Earth

At once ethereal and weighty, Dharma’s Dance journeys a surprisingly wide terrain. It begins with sparkling yet often sad or sly reminiscences of free-loving youth in the 1960s, gradually deepening to the patina of age in the new millennium, that first mourns then rises again to amused joy. This is a collection of rich poems from a richly lived life.

–Ujjvala Bagal Rahn, finalist 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize; runner-up 2021 William Wisdom – William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition

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DHARMA’S DANCE by Christine Poythress – Finishing Line Press