So this just happened: Julia Louis-Dreyfus just gave her mom’s FLP book a shout out on threads. We are publishing her mom Judith Bowles. Her book is available at finishinglinepress.com/produ… #poetry #poets #awardwinning #books #booktok

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… 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

An Excerpt from a Long Poem by Jon D. Lee paddockreview.com/2026/06/12… #poetry #epic #history #Eden

New from Finishing Line Press: UPON THEM THE LIGHT SHINED by Matt Bialer   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   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.

FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself by Catherine Arra   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   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 catherinearra.com   PRAISE:   “Good poems (and these are really good) have the power to rip the curtains away from things we know are there, but don’t talk about openly. Arra’s insights are raw and honest and earnest. When she says “Give witness to each death, betrayal, and ambush. / Mark them all with a cross and a prayer.” she speaks for us all, for what we’ve suffered, how we’ve survived. These aren’t just “all the versions of herself”—they are versions of you and me and the childhood terror, the grown-up hopes, the coming-to-terms with life’s unfairness that run through us all. All this, balanced with the wisdom of “Understand it hurts because you loved / not because you didn’t.” This is a collection to be read carefully and quietly. You may find you learn as much about yourself as you do about the author.” –j.lewis, editor of Verse-Virtual and author of all these things are broken   Catherine Arra may not be the first poet to confront womanhood’s hazards. But in Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself, the poet fans those hazards like cards in a winning hand, and we glimpse not only the personae–defiant and diffident, tender and outraged–promised by the title but aspects of those masks rendered in the most animate terms. Hewn from fairy tale, myth, pop culture, and lives tinted boldly, Arra’s are poems whose appetites are “glinting” and whose speakers welcome us “into new wilderness.” –Joshua Davis, author of Authentic Embellishments: Fragments of a Life Saved by Poetry   “In these lush and unsparing poems, Catherine Arra confronts and configures the self as a composite of its many roles and iterations: daughter, wife, ex-wife, lover, friend, and woman... I felt both nourished and electrified by this collection, and these poems which “root us in the bones/of loving.” –Kristen Holt-Browning, author of Ordinary Devotion   Please share/please repost   #booktok #poetry #FLP#book

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… 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 paddockreview.com/2026/06/12… #poetry #life #death #grief #ashes

My new #poetry collection, At Every Stage I’ve Been, is coming out in October from @FLPress! Pre-order your copy today! finishinglinepress.com/produ… #poems #newrelease #book #chapbook #blindpoet #womanpoet

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… 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. jopitkin.com

A Poem by Jo Pitkin paddockreview.com/2026/06/11… #poetry #nature #sunlight

FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: They Spoke of the River by Judith Bowles   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   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.   PRAISE:   JUDITH BOWLES has the ear of the cautious trapper in her poem by that name, one who listens to the wind,  “a shimmering sound meant only for this earth this day.” So much of her brilliant new collection, They Spoke of the River, her third and the winner of the William Meredith Award, recalls the language and attention of naturalists of another century, the lyricism of a Thoreau or a Muir. But with her Columbus roots, her clarity of speech, and her fresh imagery, Bowles most reminds me of another writer from the hills of the Ohio territory, her literary contemporary, Mary Oliver. This is a spiritual book if spirituality is the hardheaded ascent up and out of the roles imposed upon us from the world that wants us to stay in our place and be good. Thus she will always be a poet of discovery, the difficult way of one’s own self in the world. They Spoke of the River is her finest book, a keen translation of the heart’s passage towards nothing short of grace. –David Keplinger, winner of The Rome Prize in Literature   They Spoke Of The River is more an experience than a reading. We’re invited into a world where every phrase is evidence/reverence for what can be saved–language created for what would otherwise be lost as memory. Judith Bowles’ clear-eyed poems show us how the value of words make a reverence for personal truth. Here in this collection are traditions, customs, family connections, skillfully crafted, vivid with felt life—the poet’s breath on every page. –Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate   I know that the Universe is a generous place because it has given us, They Spoke of the River, a new book of poems by Judy Bowles. This is a book of joyful simultaneity, a book that arcs in and out of a lifetime, with an eye to the future, while mindfully loving the present. Much like the heliotrope flower follows the sun along its daily journey, we live a lifetime, struggle in the wake of family tragedies, and reckon with parts of the American past that can never stay in the past. “I put myself near you with these words”, the world is a brief and expansive sojourn while held for us in the hands of this poet. –Majda Gama, author of The Call of Paradise

New from FLP: Between Merwin and Greger, Overtones of Poetry by Glenn D’Alessio   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   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

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… 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

A Poem by Masin Persina paddockreview.com/2026/06/11… #poetry #life #kindness

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… James Wyshysnki’s poems in Emigrant from an Imagined Country delve into how loss, grief and trauma affect a third generation Ukrainian who grew up in the Bronx in the late 70s. The poems explore loss in many facets–people, places, memory and what it takes to turn loss into art, and what turning loss into art, in turn, can do to heal. #UkrainianDiaspora #poetry #booktok #grief #trauma James Wyshynski grew up in the Bronx, NY, the son of second-generation Ukrainian immigrants. After studying English and Russian Studies at Colby College, he received his MFA in Poetry at the University of Alabama. Traveling from North to South, with pit stops along the way in New England, Wyshynski has absorbed the fullness of American life and reflected its strange, often beautiful contradictions in his work. His poems are crafted with meticulous attention, inviting readers into moments of sharp observation and resonant emotion. Often exploring themes of memory, cultural inheritance, and the subtle complexities of everyday life, Wyszynski’s work has appeared in publications such as The Cincinnati Review, American Poetry Review, and Nimrod, and he has been recognized twice by the Pushcart Press.

A Poem by James Wyshynski paddockreview.com/2026/06/10… #poetry #life #maine

New from Finishing Line Press: Hollering Spell by Alyx Chandler   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   New Women’s Voices Series No. 193 Like the distinctive hum of a cicada, the poems in Hollering Spell emerge curious but urgent, taking readers to the edge of Appalachia to revel in a girl’s story of growing up in the South. Alyx Chandler delves into her debut collection with family lore, landscape, maternal lineage, sexuality, accent, and the dissonance of a place with “so much sweet paired with sting,” a hometown where “bless your heart is an insult if you use it right.” All the way from Alabama’s backroads past the GO TO CHURCH or the Devil Will Get You billboard to the “mannequin land” of cash-only flea markets to the messy piles of shrimp shells at Gulf Shores, Hollering Spell devours memories like a plate of southern comfort food. The poems move between domestic spaces and wild terrain, from porches with rocking chair ghosts to beaches where jellyfish sting, revealing just how close tenderness can be to violence. With every holler, Alyx Chandler reminds us how we remain spellbound by who and where we came from, how we’re never quite able to forget our first home.” For more, go to: instagram.com/alyxabc/. #poetry #alabama #southernwriting #ocean #gulfshores #Appalachia Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a poet from the South, currently living in Chicago, Illinois, where she teaches undergraduate writing, as well as poetry to kids across the city as a Poet-in-Residence through the Chicago Poetry Center.  alyxchandler.com or on Instagram: @alyxabc   PRAISE:   Like many a Southern gal with a sweet drawl, the poems in Alyx Chandler’s Hollering Spell are smarter—sharper, wiser, more deft and deeply cutting—than their good manners might make them look. But first, let’s praise those manners, or, as they ought to rightly be called, craft: These poems ripple with the music of carefully deployed alliteration, imagistic derring-do, and the lost art of multi-leveled metaphor where girlhood, for instance, is “a fresh-cut lawn / where secrets [are] coiled // like a water hose / stuck in kinks // spouting knots / writhing in grass // begging to spit.” Chandler takes what could be sentimental in less skilled hands—family, place of origin, memory—and, like peeling the shell from a fat Gulf shrimp, reveals the richness that is possible through the act of genuinely curious examination. As Chandler writes, “I know antennas / are all about intimacy.” And so are these perfect poems. –Keetje Kuipers, author of LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS   Hollering Spell is for anyone who suspects “beauty / ain’t shit but it exists” and rather revel in the body’s visceral joy. You will devour and savor the “sweet paired with / sting” Alyx Chandler cooks up here. I know I have and will for years to come. –Tina Mozelle Braziel, author of Glass Cabin and Known by Salt   Is pride a wound or a weapon, and what’s that make Chandler’s hometown–a speck that she can’t make out but try, a bullet hole, a turtle creep of Toyotas, old airfields, short-leaf pines hug-haunting a highway? Alyx Chandler is as bitingly Southern gothic as one can get in such a short space. Chandler’s poetry, a mountain dark as urge, has such McCullersian wit and eye that I lassoed between guffawing and getting gut busted. Did I attempt to erase my lineage to cruelty? I love these poems, how all roads lead me South in them, how I, too, want to get a little hollering just to holler out. How I ask myself and every Southerner I know: what part of your accent has survived? And then I tell them to read Hollering Spell, read it right now under the devil’s billboard on I-65. –C. Russell Price, author of Bisquick: An American Séance   Please share/please repost  #FLP #preorder #poetry #booktok

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Long For This World by Emily W. Pease    On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   WINNER OF THE NEW WOMEN’S VOICES PRIZE IN POETRY   None of us is “long for this world,” the saying goes, so we may as well live with a due sense of wonder. In this collection of poems, to “long for this world” is to be open to the unexpected, like a turtle on a runway or angel on a beach at night. The three magi cross the desert, following a star, and one of them is a “fly queen” wearing pearls. A mother offers hard and daring advice, and a fancy neighbor keeps a pet raccoon. The speaker in these poems has enjoyed intimate desire as well as grief and loss, and when she witnesses a solar eclipse, filled with awe, comes to this conclusion: “we are full and hollow/and vacant at last,/ just as we all suspected.” #wonder #expectation #lust #women #natural world #God   Emily W. Pease is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Williamsburg, VA, where she has taught writing at William & Mary. She is the 2025 winner of the William Matthews Poetry Prize at the Asheville Poetry Review and the 2025 winner of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in Juniper, Litmosphere, One, The Florida Review, and Rattle. Her collection of short stories, Let Me Out Here, won the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Award at Hub City Press in 2018. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.   PRAISE:   “My mother said remember,” and we do. Through the poems of Emily Pease, we heed that imperative and remember to remake the world daily. In this debut poetry chapbook, ordinary life and extraordinary loss walk hand-in-hand like terrifying companion angels in a Rilkean South. Emily Pease is wildly in love with the language of poetry, and wildly, language loves her back. –Majda Gama, author of The Call of Paradise, winner of the TwoSylvias Chapbook Prize, and In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls Please share/please repost  #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… In The Pink House / Rising Up Singing, memory becomes both landscape and language. This collection of 34 narrative poems traces a childhood and adolescence spent on a remote barrier island along North Carolina’s Outer Banks during the 1950s—a time when the coast remained largely untouched, a “virgin strip of sand” shaped more by tide and storm than by development. At the center stands the pink house, a place of shelter and fracture, where generations overlap: a grandmother’s grounding presence, a mother’s quiet endurance, and the tension of a fragile marriage that hums beneath daily life. Around it, the natural world presses close—sand shifting underfoot, dunes breathing, the Atlantic in constant motion, and hurricanes arriving with both violence and strange clarity. These poems move in a connected arc, building a portrait of place that is inseparable from the emotional terrain of growing up. The speaker’s voice is distinctly southern—lyrical, reflective, and at times spiritual—attuned to the rhythms of land and family alike. Weather becomes metaphor, the earth a kind of witness, and memory a way of reclaiming what time has altered or erased. More than nostalgia, this collection is an act of preservation. It offers readers—especially those familiar with the Outer Banks—a return to what once was, while inviting all readers to inhabit a world where childhood, nature, and the sacred are deeply intertwined. #OuterBanksPoetry #NatureAndSpirit #FamilyAndMemory #NarrativePoetry #ThePinkHouse Tanya Young is recipient of first prize in the 2025 Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Contest, sponsored by Orchard Street Press, LTD. She is a member of Wildacres Writers of Asheville, NC; Florida State Poets Association and Florida Writers Association.

A Poem by Tanya K. Young paddockreview.com/2026/06/10… #poetry #life #nature #beachlife