Finishing Line Press

10/17/2025

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: My Mother’s Husbands by Anna Gasaway
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/my-mothers-husbands-by-anna-gasaway/

In My Mother’s Husbands, the poet draws pictures of men rotating through her mother’s life. The child knows that she will not be provided the safety and security that she longs for. She yearns for her mother and her attention, but knows to keep away. She is attracted to her mother’s way of life, but knows that she cannot follow in her path. With humor and poignancy, the poet provides a roadmap for those on similar journeys. “To be upstairs and downstairs at the same time,” to scrutinize and make a way out of chaos and to live in the aftermath. , , ,

Anna Abraham Gasaway (She/Her) is an emerging disabled writer published in Frontier, Zone 3, Cream City Review, Poetry International, Anti-Heroin Chic, One Art and others. She received her MFA from SDSU and serves as an editorial assistant for the Los Angeles Review. She can be found on BlueSky: .bsky.social, Twitter/X at and IG: annagasaway.

PRAISE FOR My Mother’s Husbands by Anna Gasaway

In My Mother’s Husbands, Gasaway turns a clear, unsentimental gaze on a mother whose string of husbands leaves little room for her children. With wit and formal control, these poems nod to the sonnet tradition, recasting unrequited love as a daughter’s quiet ache for care and constancy. In “After the Fall,” a rare moment of rescue by the father is echoed later in “Hush,” where the speaker imagines sinking peacefully to the bottom of a pool—a vision of surrender that resists, but doesn’t escape, the pull of her mother’s world. The bond between mother and daughter forms the book’s true center, defined as much by absence as by longing, and the cost of walking away is felt in every silenced note.
–Blas Falconer, author most recently of Rara Avis, winner of the Thom Gunn award and Forgive the Body Its Failure

In this tenacious and vulnerable collection, the speaker embarks on a quest to break generational trauma. Here, inheritance becomes a burden and memory a wound. Both church and home are recast as sites of danger. In these intimate and raw poems, Gasaway reaches beyond the colloquial narrative scaffolding built on each page, past portraiture and nostalgic imagery into a terrain where agency is reclaimed through grit and grace.
–Brent Ameneyro, author of A Face out of Clay and Puebla

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In My Mother’s Husbands, Gasaway turns a clear, unsentimental gaze on a mother whose string of husbands leaves little room for her children. With wit and formal control, these poems nod to the sonnet tradition, recasting unrequited love as a daughter’s quiet ache for care and constancy. In ....

10/17/2025

The poems in Collected Father were written by a son about his father born in the dark shadows of Polish history in the early 20th century. Stark poverty. A brutish peasant father. Three brutal years in a N**i labor camp during WW II. These poems are intimate, emotional, and heartbreaking. Their violence is disturbing. They sometimes inhabit the territory where blackest humor rules. Yet the poems, despite their darkness, are charged with language and images that erupt into unexpected beauty. After the war the father arrives in mid-century America with a wife, also a N**i labor camp survivor, and an infant son born in a German Displaced Persons camp. He fathers a new American son on whom he visits shades of the abuse he’d endured in Poland and the labor camp. Trying to understand his damaged father turns out to be the only way the son can show him love, but the father makes that nearly impossible. The poems in Collected Father exist in the province between Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father. They show that the Holocaust’s effects can traverse oceans and time to add a generational chapter to the library of Holocaust literature. -generation Holocaust experience refugees in America -son relationship violence

John Pijewski is the author of a book of poems, Dinner with Uncle Jozef, published by Wesleyan University Press. Collected Father is John’s second book of poems. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Tri-Quarterly, Seneca Review, Poetry Northwest, The New Yorker, and other journals. https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/collected-father-by-john-pijewski/

10/17/2025

A Poem by John Pijewski
https://paddockreview.com/2025/10/17/a-poem-by-john-pijewski/

Ritual When he finished with me my father put his belt back on. I hugged him until he stopped crying, then guided him back to his room down the darkened hallway, tucked …

10/16/2025

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: wolf mutter by K. Blasco Solér
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/wolf-mutter-by-k-blasco-soler/

wolf mutter traverses psychogeography, hybrid persona, and narratives of intergenerational and ecological trauma and connection in the high-desert and alpine landscapes of Colorado. Conceived during a period of maternal grief and a two-year study of the extermination and reemergence of gray wolves in the Southern Rockies, this poetic sequence is articulated from research, interviews with wolf biologists, a writing retreat in wolf territory along the Colorado-Wyoming border, and inspiration/collaboration with other poets writing into deep ecology and the Anthropocene. wolf mutter speaks urgently to our capacities for personal, collective, and interspecies survival in a rapidly changing world with dynamic form, vivid imagery, and intimate familiarity. -poetry

K. Blasco Solér lives in Gainesville and teaches writing and literature at the University of Florida while researching the borderless relations between land, water, and cultural memory. K’s poetry is informed by an upbringing in Alaska, a background in science writing, and a recent study of intergenerational trauma and the reemergence of the gray wolf in the Southern Rockies. K completed her MFA in creative writing and poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

PRAISE FOR wolf mutter by K. Blasco Solér

This poem sequence takes the shape of a journey’s travel log, plotted on various maps at once geographical and geological. These are maps of recorded personal and ancient history and vital myths. We accompany the speaker through the shifting landscapes and biophanies, while the speaker’s I often retreats allowing the ambient sounds of nonhuman animals to surface. Lyrically intricate, and often oracular in its speech, the lines in this book pierce through the thick ecological grief we carry, lighting and shading the relationships between everything alive.

–Carolina Ebeid, author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts, and Hide.
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“This poem sequence takes the shape of a journey’s travel log, plotted on various maps at once geographical and geological. These are maps of recorded personal and ancient history and vital myths. We accompany the speaker through the shifting landscapes and biophanies, while the speaker’s I....

10/16/2025

NEW FROM FLP: Also the Gentle World by Robert Morrison Randolph
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/also-the-gentle-world-by-robert-morrison-randolph/

Also the Gentle World includes poems about a woman playing dulcimer while an osprey flies in the rain, the sea breaking on stone inside a moth’s wing, and other deep images of intense gentleness. The fifteen four-line poems and one six-line poem build worlds of powerfully focused fragility and the ask the reader to love honestly.

Robert Morrison Randolph was born into a family that had no running water in the house and heated three rooms with one kerosene stove. From his parents he learned about gentleness combined with strength. He has recently retired from college English teaching. He has a B.A., three M.A. degrees, a Ph.D., and significant academic achievement as well as having carried the mail on a rural route and pastored a small country church. This book contains 16 short poems, each an entryway into the a powerful and revelatory world of gentleness.

PRAISE FOR Also the Gentle World by Robert Morrison Randolph

Robert Randolph’s Also the Gentle World reads like wind slipping through curtains—quiet, reverent, and impossibly holy. His poems do not shout; they listen. In these verses, the ordinary is transfigured; a teacup becomes a portal, a flagpole becomes a brushstroke, a moth’s wing whispers of distant oceans. Reading Randolph is like walking beside a stream with an old friend who names the light as it falls. This collection reminds me why we write poetry in the first place—not to explain, but to invite wonder.
–Zachary Yonko, author of Sixty-Six Reveries: A Poet’s Walk Through the Field of Scripture

There is nothing slight about Robert Randolph’s newest collection, Also the Gentle World. These brief, delicate poems mesmerize. They contain worlds that reverberate one within the other—“Within / the moth’s wing / a distant sea / breaks on stone.” Meditate on the silence Randolph’s images create. Let snow fall through you. Watch as “stars open / their glass doors.” These are poems to memorize.
–Marjorie Maddox, author of Seeing Things

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“Robert Randolph’s Also the Gentle World reads like wind slipping through curtains—quiet, reverent, and impossibly holy. His poems do not shout; they listen. In these verses, the ordinary is transfigured; a teacup becomes a portal, a flagpole becomes a brushstroke, a moth’s wing whispers of ...

10/16/2025

How to Write a Bench presents poems and paintings from the latter years, exploring the loss of family and friends, the challenges of the body, and the ongoing wonders of love and daily life. It is also a meditation on creativity itself, asking how pen and brush help attend to life, revealing matters of the heart and spirit. Like any good bench, this creative work invites the reader to stop, sit, think, gaze, and enjoy.

, , , ,

David Hummon is a poet, painter, and emeritus Professor (Holy Cross College), educated at Columbia College and U.C., Berkeley. He enjoys sharing his creative work through exhibitions, artist books, readings, and publication in literary journals, including The Healing Muse, The Bicoastal Review, The Connecticut River Review, The Naugatuck River Review, The Northern New England Review, The Unitarian Universalist World, and other outlets. How to Write a Bench offers a curated selection of poetry and art from the last decade. He currently lives in Wi******er, Massachusetts.

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/how-to-write-a-bench-by-david-hummon/

10/16/2025

A Poem by David Hummon
https://paddockreview.com/2025/10/16/a-poem-by-david-hummon/

SOME MORNINGS EVERYTHING IS A POEM Bailey and I dog a bit in bed, nuzzling and sniffing like lost friends. Yesterday’s white socks, one halfway in- side out, hopscotch to the wi…

10/15/2025

Check out this review:
https://www.calyxpress.org/reviews/watching-from-the-bleachers-by-eileen-ivey-sirota/

Altered is a collaborative effort by the writers’ collective The Foothill Five—all of whom serve as editors and contributors for the collection.

10/15/2025

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: The Edge of Everything by Jo Bower
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-edge-of-everything-by-jo-bower/

The Edge of Everything traces Jo Bower’s evolving , as well as the challenges and gifts of . It also celebrates local and nourishing encounters with the and human world as it documents the poet’s journey toward living as her most authentic self.

Jo Bower’s passions encompass unexpected treasures found in the natural world, healing through authentic human connections and the craggy coasts of Massachusetts and Maine. From her upbringing in a small New England seaside town, to adventures in West Africa, to the vagaries and challenges of intimate relationships, this book follows the arc of Bower’s life from childhood to cronehood. Her many insights into the hidden gifts of aging, relationships and personal growth carry universal wisdom.

PRAISE FOR The Edge of Everything by Jo Bower

Jo Bower, in her debut poetry collection, The Edge of Everything, gives us a brave sojourn into her deeply evocative story with a sense of vital collective wisdom we can relate to and draw strength from. Her poetry at once enlightens and delves deeply into the mystery and fortitude of hope, healing, and discovery. Bower explores the turning of seasons with a daughter and a mother. Many honest explorations into love and growth that also reflect the cherished landscapes of her life. These places: oceans and lakes, wildernesses and edges of the known, are the connective tissue at The Edge of Everything.Her poems help us peer into our own uncertainty with grace and courage.
–Laurie McMillan, Writing Facilitator, writes

Jo Bower’s poetry is infused with images and sensations from a lifetime of becoming: of human touchstones, re-envisioned perspectives, and always nature’s reassurance. Her sensibility and prisms of appreciation shine through in this unfolding coming-of-age story, beautifully told. Bower’s gift to her readers is a poetic freeze-frame on every page, offering both poignancy and insight. Her collection begins in a world of difference, ultimately finding serenity in an abundance of acceptance and love. New England landscapes and seascapes are never far away, inspiring and contextualizing this wayfarer’s honest journey to The Edge of Everything.
–Caroline Donnan

Have you ever thought that you “carried brokenness?” Have you ever wanted to find a bridge between that brokenness and a land of repair? Then give Jo Bower’s poetry in The Edge of Everything a read. You will find the “logic of repair” and a friend whose “compass” is true.

Bower understood early that she was different. But her inquisitive nature gave rise to a study of desire, desolation, confusion and contradiction – a unique lens on observing and doing. Her winding path through contradiction and contentment emerges, holding nuggets of pleasure and insight.

Bower’s inquiries into the meaning of life, with all its unexpected passions make this book a surprising and satisfying companion. Your own stories will surely resonate with this invitation to “the edge of everything.”
—(sb) sōwbel, co-founder of D’esperanto Publications, Tiamat Gallery, and Ponder Hoot Poets Lecture Series

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Jo Bower, in her debut poetry collection, The Edge of Everything, gives us a brave sojourn into her deeply evocative story with a sense of vital collective wisdom we can relate to and draw strength from. Her poetry at once enlightens and delves deeply into the mystery and fortitude of hope, ...

10/15/2025

Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in September 2025 by The Poetry Box, Finishing Line Press, Bottlecap Press, The Bodily Press, Bloodaxe Books, In Case of Emergency Press, Rattle, Cathexis Northwest Press, Green Linden Press & Black Lawrence Press.