Blog Archives

Rooted and Winged by Luanne Castle (Sept.-Oct. 2022)

Please join us for our Fall 2022 blog tour for Rooted and Winged by Luanne Castle, published by Finishing Line Press in September 2022.

The poems of Rooted and Winged explore the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. They are of the earth, the place of fertile origins, and of the dream world we observe and imagine when we look upward. Golems and ghosts that emerge from the ground, as well as the birds and angels that live above us, inhabit the collection. We will always be striving for flight, even as we feel most comfortable closest to the earth.

Advance Praise:

“The poems of Luanne Castle’s Rooted and Winged are embedded in land and weather. ‘Bluegills snap up larvae in slivers of illusory light,’ she writes early in the collection, hinting at the sensibilities of the companionable speaker who will usher us through the book. She sees. She is open to the world out there. She calls herself ‘unknown but solid,’ a teller of ‘tiny limitless tales.’ She is engaged in the retrieval of generational memory: ‘one hairbrush, a plastic ball / a swaying branch, leaves decaying / the insides of my grandmothers’ fridges / bubble and pop into shards of memory / dangerous to the touch,’ she writes, enacting the progression from concrete detail to concrete memory to the kind of numinous memory that can be combustible. How rare it is, to discover a writer who notices that ‘Grandma used to stand under the bulb over the sink that haloed her and pearlized the onions she chopped,’ who can bring language to this: ‘When the last star falls to the others, / it darkens like the hush in a theatre, / a twinkling or two from silence.’ There is no arrogance in this book, but there is power.” –Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winning author, author of frank: sonnets, Four-Legged Girl, and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

“Luanne Castle’s Rooted and Winged is an intimate journey through a topography where home encounters wilderness, and where the speaker must determine what she owes to her children, to aging loved ones, to the land and its wild inhabitants, and to herself. In poetry that reveals the connection between what we inherit and what we leave behind, between what changes and what remains constant, Castle explores the mystery of what happens after a person ‘survives [her] own birth.’ The resulting work is undeniably graceful, compelling, and heartrending. ‘The way the sun came between me and the water will always seem like an introduction,’ Castle writes, as she deftly creates, from the seemingly mundane, ‘something splendid.'” –Chera Hammons, author of Maps of Injury

“Rooted and Winged is a fitting title for this collection of poems that plant themselves in reality but often hint at the surreal. Throughout, Luanne Castle has mastered sound and image: ‘I’ve done my best with feet and fists, my small / lungs blossoming like paper flowers in water…’ The poem that lingers most for me is ‘A Year in Bed, with Windows’ in which stark details create a palpable intimacy.” –Karen Paul Holmes, author of No Such Thing as Distance.

About the Poet:

Luanne Castle’s new poetry collection is Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press). Kin Types (Finishing Line Press), a chapbook of poetry and flash nonfiction, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her first collection of poetry, Doll God (Aldrich), won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Luanne’s Pushcart and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, American Journal of Poetry, Pleiades, Tipton Poetry Review, River Teeth, TAB, Verse Daily, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Saranac Review, Grist, and other
journals.

Available at Finishing Line Press and from Luanne Castle’s Bookstore.

Blog Tour Schedule:

Sept. 15: Review Tales by Jeyran Main (interview)

Sept. 22: The Bookish Elf (interview)

Sept. 28: the bookworm (guest post)

Oct. 4: Author Anthony Avina’s Blog (interview)

Oct. 11: The Book Connection (interview)

Oct. 19: CelticLady’s Reviews (guest post)

Oct. 25: The Soapy Violinist (guest post)

Follow the blog tour with the hashtag #rootedandwinged @writersitetweet #LuanneCastle

Posted in Past Blog Tours

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Tags: Finishing Line Press, Luanne Castle, poetry, Rooted and Winged

What Mothers Withhold by Elizabeth Kropf (Jan.-Feb. 2021)

Jan 2

Posted by sagustocox

Join us for our winter blog tour for Elizabeth Kropf’s What Mothers Withhold, published by Finishing Line Press in January 2021.

The poems of “what mothers withhold” are songs of brokenness and hope in a mother’s voice, poems of the body in its fierceness and failings. Elizabeth Kropf’s poems revel in peeling back silence, and invite us to witness a complicated and traumatic world that is also filled with love.

–Cindy Huyser, poet and editor, author of “Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems.”

With these visceral poems, poet and mother Elizabeth Kropf has composed a chant of the vocabulary of vulnerability. From fertility to conception to birth—or not—and into motherhood, Kropf’s recounting of her experiences compels the reader to enter and acknowledge the power of what mothers endure and withhold.

–Anne McCrady, author of Letting Myself In and Along Greathouse Road

About the Author:

Elizabeth Kropf earned her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Perelandra College and is widely published in literary publications, including The Texas Poetry Calendar, The Penwood Review, and Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature. A dream called her from California to Texas where she now lives with her husband and daughters.

Add to GoodReads:

Pre-Orders Available at Finishing Line Press.

Blog Tour Schedule:

Jan. 7: The Book Lover’s Boudoir (Review)

Jan. 7: Review Tales by Jeyran Main (Interview)

Jan. 12: Unconventional Quirky Bibliophile (Review)

Jan. 14: Review Tales by Jeyran Main (Review)

Jan. 20: Wall-to-Wall Books (Review)

Jan 25: Musings of a Bookish Kitty (Review)

Jan. 27: Diary of an Eccentric (Guest Post)

Feb. 11: Diary of an Eccentric (Review)

Feb. 23: Suko’s Notebook (Guest Post)

Follow the blog tour with the hashtag #WhatMothersWithhold #ElizabethKropf

Posted in Past Blog Tours

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Tags: Elizabeth Kropf, Finishing Line Press, poetry, What Mothers Withhold

An EveryDay Thing by Nancy Richardson (Summer 2018)

Jun 27

Posted by sagustocox

EverydayThing Join us for our summer 2018 tour for Nancy Richardson’s An EveryDay Thing, published by Finishing Line Press in July 2018.

Richardson’s poems concern coming of age in the rust-belt of Ohio during a period of decay of the physical and political structures that made the region once solid and predictable. Her poems chart the shifting of the foundations upon which a life is built and the unpredictability of events that have profound personal and political consequences, including the shootings at Kent State University.

Early Praise:

“Without poetry there would be no history,” wrote Paz, and Nancy Richardson superb book is proof enough. Anchored in the tragic events of Kent State, but radiating out to examine other forms of violence and relationships, Nancy Richardson’s poems speak eloquently and superbly to our own times. To do this she counterpoints the “everyday” whether that be an apt observation or a family event and its unique quality. So for instance, in “Queen Anne’s Lace,” set suddenly in the midst all this, she understands its “Delicacy / in the midst of loss,” but does not stop there, rather moves on to what good poetry should do—heal—as she ends it by noting “these petals of silk, this snowflake of stars,” an image that lets us transcend but not avoid the real world she describes. This is an important book, deftly written, a must read. –Richard Jackson, UTNAA Distinguished Professor of English, Vermont College

“These terse, understated poems pack a great emotional punch. Unerringly, Nancy Richardson hits the mortal vulnerabilities and the socio-political ones. This book is a history of the grievous wastefulness of a post-WWII United States that in many ways has gone to hell; yet there is no accusation here. Rather, there is the poetry of what has been shattered—be it in a motorcycle accident or voter fraud or the Kent State killings—and cannot be put back together.” –Baron Wormser, Author of Tom o’ Vietnam and former Poet Laureate of Maine

“Nancy Richardson‘s voice is clearly heard through this beautiful and insightful collection. She makes the ordinary extraordinary with her choice of rich images.” –Madeleine Kunin: Author of My Coming of Age: My journey through the Eighties

About the Poet:

Nancy Richardson’s poems have appeared in journals anthologies. She has written two chapbooks. The first, Unwelcomed Guest (2013) by Main Street Rag Publishing Company and the second, the Fire’s Edge (2017) by Finishing Line Press concerned her formative youth in the rust-belt of Ohio and the dislocation, including the Kent State shootings that affected her young adulthood. In An Everyday Thing, she has included those poems and extended the narrative to memories of persons and events and the make a life.

She has spent a good deal of her professional life working in government and education at the local, state, and federal levels and as a policy liaison in the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Education and for the Governor of Massachusetts. She received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College in 2005 and has served on the Board of the Frost Place in Franconia, NH. Visit her website.

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