Finishing Line Press

09/19/2025

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: No Fault of Water by Kelsey D. Mahaffey
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/no-fault-of-water-by-kelsey-d-mahaffey/

No Fault of Water chronicles the author’s journey through a turbulent summer marked by her partner’s alcoholism. Written from the shadows of a shared life, these sensory-rich poems navigate the shifting tides of love, denial, and ultimately, redemption. Grounded in evocative language, each poem sings with emotional clarity, offering readers an intimate glimpse into the ache of holding on—and the quiet strength it takes to let go.

Kelsey D. Mahaffey is a Nashville poet who keeps half her heart in New Orleans. Her work can be seen in: Deep South Magazine, Pinch, andCumberland River Review, among others. No Fault of Water is her debut chapbook. Instagram: Website: www.kelseydmahaffey.com

PRAISE FOR No Fault of Water by Kelsey D. Mahaffey

“Mahaffey’s poetry sings in a voice that’s both ancient and thoroughly, devastatingly modern—exploring what it feels like to be a woman on earth as well as in spirit. She doesn’t shy away from the nitty-gritty, nor the sublime; She bears witness to all sides. These poems are as brave and as necessary as they are beautiful.”
–Anna Elise Anderson

“Reading this chapbook felt like stepping into a healing ritual—one that drew my body and spirit into full attention. With spare, piercing language, Mahaffey evokes the sensual, the sacred, and the sorrowful, reminding us how deeply we are shaped by what we dare to feel––and by the power of listening that is both attentive and attuned to what so often goes unsaid.”
–Jenny Hegland, Executive Director, The Good Listening Project

“In her gorgeous debut chapbook, Kelsey Mahaffey offers a haunting portrait of intimacy. Set against the moody backdrop of New Orleans, these poems not only chart the choppy waters of loving someone through alcoholism but also stand as a testament to strength and remarkable tenderness. In Mahaffey’s emotional landscapes, sorrow and beauty coexist and human spirit endures. These are generous, brave, lyrically astonishing poems that ask what we live in service of and what we’re willing to give for love. “Like a river lost in pursuit of the sea,” they carry us toward something vast and heartbreaking.”
–Andrea Jurjević, Author of Small Crimes and In Another Country

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“Mahaffey’s poetry sings in a voice that’s both ancient and thoroughly, devastatingly modern—exploring what it feels like to be a woman on earth as well as in spirit. She doesn’t shy away from the nitty-gritty, nor the sublime; She bears witness to all sides. These poems are as brave and a...

09/19/2025

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: VESTIGES by Savannah Grant
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/vestiges-by-savannah-grant/

What does too much time spent on dating apps and not enough time spent on yourself feel like? What does being under construction (spiritually speaking) look like? Are you present with the process or avoiding it, and what, if any, closure is needed or being denied? VESTIGES seeks to answer, or at least explore, these questions, as the speaker weaves through the very beginning stages of the healing journey in the context of bad dates, missed connections, and the seemingly small details of everyday life. Instagram: .lilac.cat

Savannah is an artist and poet living in Western MA. She has been published in Sixfold Journal four times and has two other chapbooks available from Bottlecap Press. Her artwork has appeared in downtown Northampton galleries several times. She is a house cleaner by day and loves local live music by night!

PRAISE FOR VESTIGES by Savannah Grant

Honest and moving and full of sharp images, Vestiges mourns and accepts a relationship’s demise. The speaker sits awake “in the heaviness of not quite rain,” lists her “tragedy clothes, and eventually asks “a louder question,” knowing the answer but longing for the why. Sharp memories and poignant realizations carry her to a needful knowing: “our differences / they’re under us / a riverbed”—and to the complex but affirming acceptance of the final poem, “Song to Myself.”

–Ellen Doré Watson, author of pray me stay eager (Alice James Books)

Recommended Reading: Vestiges by Savannah Grant is both heartbreaking and beautiful. This stunning collection guides the reader through grief, love, and resilience, ultimately offering a path toward healing.

—Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita, Northern Kentucky University

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Honest and moving and full of sharp images, Vestiges mourns and accepts a relationship’s demise. The speaker sits awake “in the heaviness of not quite rain,” lists her “tragedy clothes, and eventually asks “a louder question,” knowing the answer but longing for the why. Sharp memories an...

09/19/2025

A Poem by Chloe Rodriguez

The Pink P***y Cat ….. sat under the overpass of North River Driveand 36th Street, roofless, a pastel pink façade.A vestige of 1980s Miami, of big hair andcocaine clouds and ecstasy laced with glit…

09/19/2025

Thank you Poets & Writers for the shout out.

Based in Kentucky, Finishing Line Press publishes around three hundred titles each year and runs a chapbook competition celebrating writers who are marginalized from mainstream publishing. Learn more about this independent press, which accepts submissions year-round: at.pw.org/FinishingLinePress

09/19/2025

Based in Kentucky, Finishing Line Press publishes around three hundred titles each year and runs a chapbook competition celebrating writers who are marginalized from mainstream publishing. Learn more about this independent press, which accepts submissions year-round: at.pw.org/FinishingLinePress

09/18/2025

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: QASIDA FOR WHEN I BECAME A WOMAN by Huma Sheikh
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/qasida-for-when-i-became-a-woman-by-huma-sheikh-nwvs-191/

Qasida for When I Became a Woman reshapes the classical ode into a contemporary elegy of grief, resilience, and renewal. Set against the backdrop of war-torn , these grapple with the unsolved murder of the poet’s father, the silences of disappearance, and the cultural restrictions placed on a young woman coming of age under military occupation. Through a blending of inherited forms and her own lyrical voice, Huma Sheikh creates a testament where violence and tenderness, absence and presence, exile and belonging coexist. Intimate yet political, this collection transforms trauma into testimony and loss into art, affirming that even in the darkest corners, memory, survival, and hope endure.

Huma Sheikh is a poet and author born and raised in Kashmir. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Journal, Consequence Magazine, Cincinnati Review, and Prism International, among others. A finalist for multiple literary prizes, she holds a PhD in English (Creative Nonfiction) and teaches writing at George Mason University.

PRAISE FOR QASIDA FOR WHEN I BECAME A WOMAN by Huma Sheikh- NWVS #191

“It is rare for a poet to write about war and the painful reverberations of political violence with such poise, much less with the purpose and passion displayed by Huma Sheikh. Employing the ancient Arabic form, the Qasida, Sheikh takes us to a volatile, war-torn Kashmir where her father, a well-known recording artist, was murdered, his body never identified, his death a mystery that haunts his daughter’s every perception as she navigates a broken world saturated with his absence. Her voice distinctive and soulful, her vision laser focused and unflinching, Sheikh transforms an unreported tragedy into an unforgettable testament in this powerful, impressive debut. ”
–James Kimbrell, author of The Law of Truly Large Numbers, his most recent book

Each of these exquisite odes has the power to tear and heal your heart on the same page, even in the same line or stanza. Huma Sheikh writes with ferocious honesty about the father who was taken from her under shockingly violent circumstances, the mother who reinvented her own life to nurture the bereft child who grew to become a strong-voiced poet of our times. When she addresses her native soil, she writes, “Kashmir, you taught me to say yes ma’am, no sir, thank you,” reminding us that an artist’s job is to traverse this beautiful, brutal world as best she can and make art of it, make poems as entrancing as these.
–David Kirby, author of The Winter Dance Party, his most recent book

Huma Sheikh takes the long history of the Arabian Ode, which has been a palace constructed by men, and makes it her own, and in this book tells the heartbreaking story of her father’s death and its aftermath. It is a story of war and death but told with such tenderness that the world is reconstructed even in the midst of “bullet storms.” In these poems grenades and apples appear on the same line as do bunkers and cherries. Even in the darkest corners of her song there is a praise of the world in all its beauty and horror. How can a man just disappear? He does, but his daughter lives to make sure that no one forgets.
–Barbara Hamby, author of Holoholo, her most recent book

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“It is rare for a poet to write about war and the painful reverberations of political violence with such poise, much less with the purpose and passion displayed by Huma Sheikh. Employing the ancient Arabic form, the Qasida, Sheikh takes us to a volatile, war-torn Kashmir where her father, a well-k...

09/18/2025

NEW FROM FLP: The Palindrome of the Sun by Veronica Sanitate
On SALE: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-palindrome-of-the-sun-by-veronica-sanitate/

Veronica Sanitate’s The Palindrome of the Sun begins in Florence, in the Baptistery, where generations came to be christened before entering the Duomo. On its floor, a black-and-white zodiac mosaic served as a living clock, the sun itself marking the year’s arc. Solstice emerges as a turning point, the fading palindrome carved around the sun evoking circularity, return, and the persistence of time. The words are barely legible, their translation lost, but Sanitate revives them, rendering the sun’s blaze as it spins constellations and traces the arc of human experience. These meditations move between art and history, science and myth, tracing cycles of life, the cosmos, and what endures. In The Palindrome of the Sun, Florence becomes both mirror and doorway; the familiar world is refracted into patterns of continuity, reflection, and return, and the reader is left to consider the measure of time, the turning of seasons, and our place within it.

Veronica Sanitate is the author of The Palindrome of the Sun (Finishing Line Press, 2026) and holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program. Her poetry manuscript Sun Standing Still was shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Sanitate serves as Vice President of Ocean Organics Corp. and is a founding director of both the Michigan Collaborative for Mindfulness in Education and Groundcover News, a street newspaper focused on homelessness solutions. The seventh child of Italian immigrants, she was born and raised in Detroit and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband.

PRAISE FOR The Palindrome of the Sun by Veronica Sanitate

Opening the pages of The Palindrome of the Sun, one enters the exquisitely realized realm that Veronica Sanitate has created, built entirely of words. In these beautifully written poems, Sanitate’s vision encompasses a rare understanding of art and history, how they overlap and coalesce, and how they become incorporated within the author’s own story of ancestry and family.
–Richard Tillinghast

In Palindrome of the Sun, Veronica Sanitate invites us to experience time as layered and luminous. Anchored by the 11th-century sundial of Florentine astronomer Strozzo Strozzi, these poems become a meditation on celestial and cyclical time, as well as the intimacy of daily rhythms—grapes ripening to purple, bread rising in ancestral ovens. Sanitate traces her lineage through a tender inquiry into temporal inheritance: its circling, its continuity, and the blur where present and past entwine. Our human legacy, she suggests, is to lose time and be lost in it. Yet these exquisitely crafted poems remind us that we belong both to stars and to soil, to constellations and to communities. At solstice and every day, Sanitate insists: “the only day is now.” There are choices—ways to dwell graciously in time. But as these poems demonstrate, to live graciously in time is not passive; you must “make your decision.”
–Katherine Larson

Veronica Sanitate returns to the Italy of her ancestors where she finds an 11thcentury mosaic, surviving as if out of time, and depicting a sun-centered universe centuries before anyone else dared to. She searches through the old language and through her own set of words, shaped by her new and different world, until she understands the words of the Master, Giordano Bruno, that “the observer is always at the center.” She convinces us that poetry might be the only medium that lets us grasp this.
–Keith Taylor

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Opening the pages of The Palindrome of the Sun, one enters the exquisitely realized realm that Veronica Sanitate has created, built entirely of words. In these beautifully written poems, Sanitate’s vision encompasses a rare understanding of art and history, how they overlap and coalesce, and how t...

09/18/2025

I do not remember what’s inside anymore is a visceral collection of poems that navigate the corridors of identity, self-destruction, and heartbreak. From the oppressive, fluorescent-lit aisles of a Wal-Mart to the conflicted echoes of loss and regret, each poem explores the spaces that trap us in a perpetual state of longing, confusion, and despair. Veronica Tyler explores self and memory in a eulogy to a brokenheart that weaves together the struggle for her sense of belonging in a word that seems to suffocate the soul. It is a piece for those who know life is never linear, and that the search for authenticity often comes at a cost.

09/18/2025

A Poem by Veronica Tyler
https://paddockreview.com/2025/09/18/a-poem-by-veronica-tyler/

Chatham Hall A morose existence. Dolorous repose. I had known it in that green house. And then the brown. Something intangible. Lured into sadness. …

09/18/2025

Boychik (“young man” in Yiddish) is a poetic coming-of-age, skillfully picturing a Jewish boyhood as seen through the wise, attentive eyes of manhood. Vitcov captures perfectly what it is to be raised in both the mystery and everydayness of Jewish faith. He does so in plain-spoken language, with...

09/18/2025

Check out this great poem in Scientific American from FLP author Faith Paulsen

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poem-love-letter-from-photograph-51/

Science in meter and verse