Finishing Line Press

Finishing Line Press Providing a Place for Poets, Writers, and Playwrights, since 1998
FLP is a proud member of CLMP Please click on the book title to purchase the books.

Please visit our New Releases page—The New Releases page is where you will find, and can purchase, our most recently published and forthcoming books (you can find the links at the top of this page.) Also, please visit our online bookstore to see who have published (more to be added soon). The books listed in our bookstore are listed under the authors' last names, and can be purchased from amazon.

com. You can also contact us via email at [email protected]
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Finishing Line Press
Post Office Box 1626
Georgetown, Kentucky 40324

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please call us at 859-514-8966 for dealer discount information, or for faster service, email us at [email protected] All orders must be prepaid and are non-returnable. FINISHING LINE PRESS IS LOCATED IN THE HEART

OF THE BLUEGRASS REGION IN CENTRAL KENTUCKY.

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Mazurka by Katieann VogelOn SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/mazurka-by-katie...
06/20/2025

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Mazurka by Katieann Vogel
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/mazurka-by-katieann-vogel/

Deep in the forest—among bears, foxes, deer, and soaring pines—a striking melody beats to river and drum. In the shadow of the Krkonoše Mountains, this song and dance multiplies in triple time: and Mazurka is born.The mazurka, a Polish waltz, is a beloved dance of Czech generations past and present that originated centuries ago under the Krkonoše Mountains, or Giant Mountains, straddling the present-day border of Czechia and Poland. Between continents, generations, languages, and cultures, the poems of Mazurka honor this music and dance of the Bohemian people, the natural worlds that inspire them, and the strong women—from antiquity to the present and into the future—that dare to face their pain and endeavor to transform it.

Katieann Vogel is a writer, artist, and outdoor educator. She lives with her partner in Monterey, California, where they enjoy fishing and hiking along the coast. In her poems, Katieann honors her grandmothers, the ocean, and changing tides.

PRAISE FOR Mazurka by Katieann Vogel

Mazurka, Katieann Vogel’s radiant, debut chapbook, more than lives up to its name. These are musically rich, imagistically strong, visually inventive poems that dance across the page and linger long in the ear and mind of the reader. Encompassing the self and the world, in all their multitudes, Vogel never shies from difficult subjects while remaining hopeful, open, and full of heart.
–Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone

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Mazurka, Katieann Vogel’s radiant, debut chapbook, more than lives up to its name. These are musically rich, imagistically strong, visually inventive poems that dance across the page and linger long in the ear and mind of the reader. Encompassing the self and the world, in all their multitudes, Vo...

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Sailing to the Edges by Jennifer M PhillipsOn SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/...
06/20/2025

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Sailing to the Edges by Jennifer M Phillips

On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/sailing-to-the-edges-by-jennifer-m-phillips/

Sailing To the Edges by Jennifer M Phillips invites readers into journeys of adventure and wonder, both historic and modern. An extended poem accompanies Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen as he sailed with a Belgian expedition to Antarctica in 1897, a harrowing journey much of which was spent trapped in ice in the complete bitterly cold darkness of polar winter. Shorter poems arise as meditations on the poet’s own travel from the stark beauty of the seas and landscapes of Iceland, Svalbard and the coast of Norway, a poignant and disturbing encounter with our rapidly changing climate.

Jennifer M Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, with two poetry chapbooks, Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity and A Song of Ascents, and forthcoming collection Wrestling With the Angel (collection, Wipf and Stock, 2025) Phillips’ work has appeared in over 100 journals, and has been twice-nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Poetry Prize.

PRAISE FOR Sailing To the Edges by Jennifer M Phillips

Sing with the poet, sailing in pellucid waters veined with delight. Stay. Breathe together in dark violent seas that threaten to smother our painstakingly composed arias. Ours too the darkness, and “just beyond the darkness is the light.” These poems gift readers with “real presence,” the glory in the pain of human experience.
—Margaret R. Miles, Professor Emerita of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.

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Sing with the poet, sailing in pellucid waters veined with delight. Stay. Breathe together in dark violent seas that threaten to smother our painstakingly composed arias. Ours too the darkness, and “just beyond the darkness is the light.” These poems gift readers with “real presence,” the gl...

A Poem by Karen Leehttps://paddockreview.com/2025/06/17/a-poem-by-karen-lee/
06/17/2025

A Poem by Karen Lee
https://paddockreview.com/2025/06/17/a-poem-by-karen-lee/

Old Scooter Breakdown II We push her into the scenic overlooka group of people spy us.As usual the men wander over to helpthey pick up tools, give advice. …. I take off my helmet,shake out m…

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: His Only Merit by Benjamin GreenOn SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/his-only-...
06/17/2025

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: His Only Merit by Benjamin Green
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/his-only-merit-by-benjamin-green/

Benjamin Green is the author of eleven books including The Sound of Fish Dreaming (Bellowing Ark Press, 1996) and the upcoming Old Man Looking through a Window at Night (Main Street Rag). At the age of sixty-eight, he hopes his new work articulates a mature vision of the world and does so with some integrity. He resides in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.

PRAISE FOR His Only Merit by Benjamin Green

“Green’s take on the Wallace Stevens’ poems certainly gives them the New Mexico touch with corn in his beard, invitations to dance– such a beautiful sharing, and reminding, of lovely experience.”
–Shirley Balance Blackwell, author of ALREADY THERE and DITCHBANK DIARIES

“A great experiment to dialog with Stevens, and invite the conversation into Green’s landscape: quiet images in nature, nature within self and within all, beauty of transience and hope.”
–Susan Entsminger, editor of PINYON REVIEW

“In this taut, earthy verse, Green sees into elemental things not beyond them, inviting us to do the same. Creek, cottonwoods, canyon wall –– the natural world becomes vibrant in these images as the author finds value and meaning in them. His Only Merit is both exquisite and edifying, calling upon flux and stillness, as well as shadows and light, to evoke a sense of presence that overrides all thought, belief and doubt. A magnificent read.“
–Walt McLaughlin, writer, naturalist and publisher of WOOD THRUSH BOOKS

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“Green’s take on the Wallace Stevens’ poems certainly gives them the New Mexico touch with corn in his beard, invitations to dance– such a beautiful sharing, and reminding, of lovely experience.”

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: A Kind of Mercy by Sharon A. FoleyOn SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a...
06/16/2025

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: A Kind of Mercy by Sharon A. Foley
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-kind-of-mercy-by-sharon-a-foley/
In her chapbook, A Kind of Mercy, Sharon A Foley portrays her twenty-nine years lived as a within the religious order of the Sisters of Mercy. She’s attracted to the order by her high school guidance counselor, a nun, who seems vibrant and fulfilled. Ms. Foley captures the intricacies of living with thirty-seven other postulants: chanting the psalms, playing softball, doing laundry, taking part in a Christmas Pageant. Throughout the book, Ms. Foley speaks of her private thoughts: doubts, desires, jealousies, admirations, and “stifled anger” as she navigates this calling. While she enjoys comradery with some nuns, she experiences conflicts and differences with others. Eventually she experiences a “gouging loneliness” that prompts her to leave this convent life. Through poems carefully crafted, Ms. Foley allows her reader to laugh and cry with her on every step of her journey.
Sharon A. Foley has had poems published in Nixes Mate Review, Words and Sports, Paterson Literary Review, Euphony, and SWWIM Everyday. She entered the Sisters of Mercy at age eighteen and lived with them as a nun for twenty-nine years. Ms. Foley has a BA in English from Salve Regina University, and an MSW from Simmons University. For many years she worked as a school social worker. She is now a private practice psychotherapist, and resides in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Her chapbook, A Kind of Mercy, was named as a finalist in the Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award.

PRAISE FOR A Kind of Mercy by Sharon A. Foley

In A Kind of Mercy, Sharon A. Foley invites us to share her life in the convent of the Sisters of Mercy, its camaraderie, joys, sorrows, challenges, and worries. She also invites us into her own heart as she comes to “a swerve in the road” that brings her life as a nun to a close. As she says in one of these finely observed and exquisitely rendered poems: “Through this simple work/ I consecrate the day.” And through the simple work of these poems she consecrates her readers’ days as well. What a beautiful, quiet, deep, and illuminating book.
–Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real

In poems as restrained and controlled as convent life, Sharon A. Foley traces her trajectory from postulant to nun as a member of the Sisters of Mercy and finally to her decision to leave the order. Her questions about her vocation are foreshadowed when, as a student teacher, she realizes that rather than form her students as the order desires “I don’t want to shape them, /I want them to bloom/into their own hues.” Eloquently describing both moments of gaiety and devotion, Foley brings us with her on her journey to reconcile her spiritual and psychic needs.
–Kathleen Aguero, Author of World Happiness Index

Sharon A. Foley challenges us to look more closely at convent life, dispelling a concept of Sister of Mercy as object “waiting to be illuminated” by God, and revealing a glorious humanity compelled by the beauty of the world. A Kind of Mercy follows Foley’s decision to become a nun, convinced by the “velvet” life of her mentor: “I love her rapture…I love her kinetic mind.” But the questions come early and continue throughout the thirty years of her sisterhood. She asks about her early mentor, “What is it about her that ignites my thirst?” Of a friend leaving the convent she questions, “homesick or frailty?” In the exquisite “Once a Month Meditation on Death” Foley attempts to “picture myself in a pine coffin,” meant to inspire a “dispassionate” detachment from bodily death, but knowing it is “running/from my father’s impending death.” The struggle of sisterhood is to replace the needs of the flesh with bending to God’s direction, but pink bras, sexual attractions, curled eyelashes, Bach, Shakespeare, and strawberries intrude. Foley’s work is an honest and rare glimpse of the poet striving for the tender mercy we should allow humanity, that of the religious sisters and that of those beyond the order.
–Carol Hobbs, author of New-found-land

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In A Kind of Mercy, Sharon A. Foley invites us to share her life in the convent of the Sisters of Mercy, its camaraderie, joys, sorrows, challenges, and worries. She also invites us into her own heart as she comes to “a swerve in the road” that brings her life as a nun to a close. As she says in...

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Hospice by Molly AkinOn SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/hospice-by-molly-aki...
06/16/2025

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Hospice by Molly Akin
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/hospice-by-molly-akin-nwvs-186/

Winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry, Hospice catalogs a decade in the poet’s life marked by becoming a while supporting a parent, reckoning with the intimate work of . Formal explorations grapple with the twinned dynamics of mothering and motherlessness. Throughout the collection, Molly Akin considers how we trace our origins and inheritance within the imperfections of memory. employs precise and deliberate syntax to examine universally human and deeply personal themes.
Molly Akin is a writer and nonprofit library director based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She has read in venues including the Emily Dickinson Museum, Wilder Words, Fine Arts Work Center, and New England Poetry Club. A semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Prize, Molly’s work has been published in journals, including Brevity, Idenity Theory, Inflectionist Review, and Paraselene. Hospice is her first published collection.

PRAISE FOR Hospice by Molly Akin

Mothering, compassion, lineage — Akin explores the mega sphere that is contemporary motherhood in this striking chapbook collection. In a lean but hard-hitting, visceral verse, Akin ardently depicts what it is like dealing with the loss of a mother, void and haunting memory. A strong, memorable debut collection!
–Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Parachutist and Bad Mexican, Bad American

Molly Akin‘s Hospice unearths the hidden beauty and devastation at the root of grief. From the life cycles of ladybugs, orchids, and loved ones, Akin offers a meditative glimpse into the ephemeral nature of living, the consuming nature of loss, “the keening cry of a bird,” and “the waters no damn can hold.” With lightness and depth, this collection unravels the sacred contradictions that sustain us, the ones embedded in being alive, of mothering, of losing and loving, again and again.
–Tatiana Johnson-Boria, author of Nocturne in Joy

Its title suggests, Molly Akin‘s debut chapbook, Hospice, is about end-of-life care––a poet bearing witness to and participating in her mother’s final weeks and days––but the etymological root of that word, the Latin hospitem, meaning “guest, stranger, sojourner, visitor,” is also very much at stake. In these poems, the reader sojourns across a defamiliarized world, acutely described with a Dickinsonian economy and cataloged, freshly, by Akin’s fine-toothed aesthetic. Akin’s is not the language of life but the language of death, of near-death and after-death: that fragment, or moan that is whispered across the “gash // wound” between the living and the dying (for in Hospice, there is nothing so gentle as a “veil”). As her mother dies from a long cancer––”spider pain / leg pain / bone pain,” her “tail / tucked / between / bone”––the poet dares also to look closely at her own flesh, her image a “coiled / Siren,” her body also a mother’s body, aging, resilient, pained, ancestral, capable, moving through time: “One big contraction,” she writes, “And it is our life / Looking back.” But for as much as this book looks back––and it does, at the poet’s origins, at language’s deep lineages, at Dickinson herself––it also gazes forward, toward a world marked by new absence and yet newly possible. “It took her / death / to wrest / my self // from / her––,” Akin writes. And that is the difficult space where these poems sit vigil: bedside new knowledge.
–Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract

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Mothering, compassion, lineage — Akin explores the mega sphere that is contemporary motherhood in this striking chapbook collection. In a lean but hard-hitting, visceral verse, Akin ardently depicts what it is like dealing with the loss of a mother, void and haunting memory. A strong, memorable de...

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