Glowing Midwest Book Review for On the Lip of Night Julie Esther Fisher’s poetry chapbook, On the Lip of Night, published by Finishing Line Press, has received an exceptional review from Kathryn Atwood in the October 2026 issue of Midwest Book Review. Calling Fisher a “prodigiously talented poet,” Atwood praises her extraordinary gift for imagery, metaphor, and musical language, observing: “Julie Esther Fisher is a prodigiously talented poet who handles the English language like an artist utilizes paint.” Atwood concludes that lovers of good poetry will find themselves returning to these poems again and again, seeking the truths beneath their beautiful lines. Read the full review: midwestbookreview.com/mbw/oc… #bookreview #poetry #recommended

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Underfoot by Brenna Mead   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Underfoot, Brenna Mead‘s publishing debut, is a collection of brief love letters to objects, experiences, and memories that serve to both interrupt and ground daily life. Each poem reminds us that our attention is currency, and that paying it carefully, curiously, and intentionally during moments otherwise easy to overlook yields an abundant wealth of understanding and enjoyment. #poetry #love #memory #attention #presence   Brenna Mead is a poet living and writing in Vermont. Her poems are love letters to objects, experiences, and memories that serve to both interrupt and ground daily life. Though she studied and taught literature at both the University of Utah and Columbia University, this chapbook marks her creative publishing debut.   PRAISE:   We tend to notice what is underfoot when it bothers or hinders us. A crumb, a fold in our sock. Underfoot treats experience, however subtle or uncomfortable, with revelatory tenderness and gratitude. Mead’s poems open the aperture of your heart and mind. They propose that no matter where we are in time or place or relationship, the sacred practice of observation is our lifelong home. –Lesley Finn, author,  essays “Final Girl, Terrible Place” in Longreads and “Book, Escape, Sanctuary” in Sunspot Literary. Creator and author of Collage Mind, a Substack newsletter on lateral thinking and creativity in written and visual art. . “Perfectly quotidian engines of joy and hardship, these tiny poems are so memorable that every moment is a masterclass.” –Sara Guest    Please share/please repost  #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… In her debut chapbook, Sogni d’oro, Elizabeth laments the death and dying of close family members through the natural and physical worlds to create space for vulnerability and explore the nuances of grief. Can a person be prepared for death or the loss of a loved one? The poems ask questions and, when not sufficiently answered in Catholic teachings or Italian traditions, Elizabeth seeks refuge in nature with the hope for spring despite a seemingly lasting season of winter. Through observation, Elizabeth transports the reader as she draws on the strength from these natural elements, music, and everyday objects holding meaning and recording time. Tankas, haibuns and tanka prose are the chorus throughout the chapbook. Here is a place of remembrance, to pause on the details of a life, and ask for forgiveness. #grief #loveandloss #italianheritage #nature #diversifyyourbookshelf Elizabeth Alfonzo is a poet, reader, cinephile, appreciator of art and authentic connection. She is a practicing physical therapist in Connecticut. Her poems have been published in Caesura, Please See Me, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Here, Waking Up to the Earth Anthology, Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Literary Anthology, The Paddock Review, Two Cardinals Literary and The Northeast Coast.

A Poem by Elizabeth Alfonzo paddockreview.com/2026/10/26… #poetry #life #death #hope

FLP SHORT STORIES BOOK OF THE DAY: MICRO-STORIES by Pamela Gay   On SALE now:  finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Pamela Gay is professor emerita at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where she taught creative writing after receiving a PhD at New York University. Her writing has been published in Iowa Review, Brevity, Midway Journal, Grey Sparrow, Vestal Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and many other literary magazines. She is also the recipient of a Saltonstall Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Homecoming that combined text, images, and artifacts, and two award-winning books: Developing Writers: A Dialogic Approach (Wadsworth) and I’m So Glad You’re Here (She Writes Press), a memoir that received Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews.   PRAISE:   Tender, poignant, playful at times, Gay’s micro-stories offer a compassionate glimpse into the unique varieties of human emotion: longing, loneliness, love. An incisive, heartwarming, even heartbreaking at times, collection, Pamela Gay is one of our very best flash fiction authors. –Jaimee Wriston Colbert, author of How Not to Drown and SUNY Distinguished Professor of English & Creative Writing at Binghamton University  . In Pamela Gay‘s new fiction collection, Micro-Stories, we are confronted with a world made small by daunting, incalculable conflicts. The private lives of the characters in these stories are made smaller by their interactions with the outer world, by scarcity, by well-meaning relatives and friends, by battles with cancer. And we can’t help but cheer them on despite the vastness of their woes, as they attempt “way[s] of healing after confronting death” in all its guises, even when death is “some person with some story that is not [our] story.” We recognize our woes in theirs and our lives are made more abundant for it. Each piece in this collection is rich and of the earth, all while aspiring to spirit. Gay’s mastery of the short form is once again on full display and demands our full regard. –Ralph Pennel, author of A World Les Prefect for Dying In and Editor-In-Chief at Midway Journal . With a compassionate and unswerving eye, Gay explores instability and the various ways in which her characters cope. A pleasure to read. –Roberta Allen, Author of The Princess of Herself and Fast Fiction   Please share/please repost   #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt  #prose #Shortstories #read

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… For anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a breakup, the five stages of grief may not be enough. Sometimes you have to rage against the dying light, express every hidden thought, say goodbye several times, and fall in (and out of) love all over again. No platitudes or vague promises can soothe the raw wounds—and maybe that’s ok. In defiance and encouragement, this collection explores what it sounds like when you feel the entirety of your feelings and allow yourself to wallow in the tender places. Turning a lens of frank honesty on both the writer and her subject, Dumpster Fire Heart is a journey of one person trying to define what living looks like after her heart has stopped beating. It’s about recognizing the ugly ways in which we hurt each other and the lengths we must crawl to in order to heal. #grief #heartache #love #healing #poetry Allie Coker holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her works have appeared in various publications including the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She has also had the pleasure of participating in residencies, retreats, and conferences with VCCA, Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, Writeaways, and NCWN. Dumpster Fire Heart is her third book. She lives in Chapel Hill.

phillychapbookreview.org/poe… #poetry #books #recommended

Nicole Zwolinski, author of Motherhead published by Finishing Line Press, will be signing books at an event at Open Book in Minneapolis, MN. The event will be Saturday, November 28 from 1-3 p.m. and feature readings by local poets. openbookmn.org/events/book-l… #poetry #event #recommended #booksigning

Mercilee Jenkins will present selections from Words You Can’t Eat in Public, her debut poetry chapbook, at Tell It On Tuesday, a monthly storytelling event, on October 27, 7:00 PM (PT) at The Marsh, Berkeley, CA. Tickets are available for the in-person show and also for the live-stream online (live-stream online tickets). This collection is soon to be publish by Finishing Line Press. Words You Can’t Eat in Public is a poetic memoir composed of twenty poems. As a queer feminist, Jenkins takes us on an emotional journey from instructions on how to find a poem in nature to the joy of sharing a last moment with a dear friend. Dr. Mercilee Jenkins is an award-winning poet, performance artist and playwright. “Words You Can’t Eat in Public meets the promise of such a title. M. Jenkins leaves us small surprises in all kinds of places. Read the poems out loud because they should be in the air, winking at us, like raindrops.”—K. Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Author of Pick a Garnet to Sleep In tellitontuesday.org/index.ph… #poetry #evnt #booksigning

Thank you to the Midwest Book Review for reviewing A Moth Collection Anna Ojascastro Guzon (Finishing Line Press) midwestbookreview.com/mbw/oc… #books #poetry #bookreview

New from Finishing Line Press: RECURRING DREAM WITH BRIGHT ORANGE EVERYTHING by Molly McGinnis   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   RECURRING DREAM WITH BRIGHT ORANGE EVERYTHING is a debut collection of poems that act as dispatches between the mysterious and the measurable, while sticking to a core belief: that few states in life are fixed. Themes of curiosity, loss, playfulness, and desire emerge across shifting settings, from the fading 20th century, to a corner store, to a friend’s backyard shot through with eerie light. #poetry #dreams #mystery #contemporary   Molly McGinnis is a writer based in Washington, D.C. She has a degree in literature from American University and currently works and studies in the Department of Epidemiology at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Her poetry has been incorporated into curricula for high school students via both CommonLit and Pearson, and she has written for a number of publications in both creative and research capacities, including Guernica, CQ Researcher, The American Institute of Physics, the Journal of Clinical Oncology: Oncology Practice, The Washington Independent Review of Books, and The Environmental Media Association. From March 2020 through May 2023, she served in a variety of leadership roles with the COVID-19 crisis response organization Medical Supply Drive (MSD), including as a regional co-coordinator for Washington, D.C. and a National Logistics Director for the United States. MSD’s work was covered by CNN, Fox, and NBC New York, among other outlets. She is a member of the Health Professionals in Training program with the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) and has volunteered with the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for over ten years.    PRAISE:   In Molly McGinnis’ new collection, her first, the literary convention of the dream vision—in a long lineage including William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, and the twentieth century dream-master, Max Jacob—arranges the ordinary into surreal shapes that startle and disturb the reader from the American delirium. We are really here, in the middle of the great nothing, blithely crossing the street, or suddenly time traveling to a forgotten evening twenty years before our births. What is brilliant about McGinnis’ work is the way she writes in a voice of utmost clarity to speak of mysterious things, where other dream poets try too hard to estrange, ending up vague and pedestrian. But this clear-mystery, this sense that all of the world outside is actually being projected from the inside (as dreams teach us), is handled in a way that feels new, delightfully reorganized into an erotic joining with the universe. It’s tantric, it’s ecstatic, this discovering the cosmos within our own flesh and blood: “Above us, evening drains to marks across the rooftops,” she writes. “Eyes of Hydra watching Cancer, Mars’s hemoglobin light.” Few old salts could paint real life as well as this author does, even now at the start of her career. –David Keplinger, author of Ice.   Recurring Dream with Bright Orange Everything is partly a naturalist’s catalogue of the sumptuous, distressing earth and the human creatures who blur their way across it, partly a researcher’s tough-minded inquiry into what is knowable in human history and in the various sciences that history has engendered. In McGinnis’s hands, we see why those “fields” of study are also called “disciplines”: it takes an iron determination to pick the lock of time’s mysteries, though under such touch “the century shivers/ and bursts.” Taking us across thousands of miles of dreamscape and literal landscape, Recurring Dream oneirically links up American imperialism, transgression and incarceration, satellite imagery and opulent jewelry. “Proof is an object we catch with our senses,” McGinnis writes, though mystery is still there, warmly “curled among facts.” A feast for the intelligence.   –Laura Kolbe, author of The Decadent Movement

TO ORDER: finishinglinepress.com/produ… In her second poetry chapbook Nine Months of Kimchi and Crying, Trish Broome takes readers on a heartfelt journey focused on loss, grief, motherhood, and culture. Through firsthand experiences and detailed memories, Broome details the deeply emotional nine-month journey following her mother’s unexpected death. From crying in a parking lot in Newport News, Virginia, to eating noodles in a Korean restaurant in Ellicott City, Maryland, her journey reminds us that even though grief may be overwhelming, we can turn that darkness into a light that radiates with the loved one’s memory. In short, this is a love story dedicated to a mother whom Broome deeply admired and respected. #poetry #motherhood #grief #loss #culture Trish Broome is a half-Korean writer and poet who grew up in Newport News, Virginia. Nine Months of Kimchi and Crying, her second chapbook, is dedicated to the mother she lost unexpectedly in July 2024. Her poetry is featured in You Might Need to Hear This, Half and One, Cure Today, Yellow Arrow “AMPLIFY” Vignette, SLAM, Performance Poetry from the Underrepresented, Novus Literary Arts Journal, Miscreant Anthology, and Voicemail Poems. Find her on Instagram @trishb.poetry

A Poem by Trish Broome paddockreview.com/2026/10/22… #poetry #life #kimchi #comfortfood #mothers @trishb.poetry

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Not I by Jane Saginaw   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   #Holocaust, #polio, #history, #Jewish, #motherdaughter PRAISE:   Jane Saginaw‘s Not I is a terrific book.  An extraordinary book.  Not your typical post-Holocaust book.  Using a structure like Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 American masterpiece Spoon River Anthology, Saginaw gives us the voices of thirty European Jewish women, full of life and vivacity, telling bits of their stories lifted from the past–with lyric beauty, authenticity, even occasional comedy. Their dates tell us that some are gone; some are still alive at the time of publication.  The poet speaks for them. One says, “I had been raised with two maids and a cook.” One  says, “I was somersaults and jacks./ In the morning I practiced scales.”  One was a partisan, another a plumber taught by a grandfather.  One takes the form of a page of Talmud. Several recall the camps.  One describes dancing on her first night in Poland, with her head shaved and the numbers on her arm burning, for a “metal-faced” man whom we understand to be Josef Mengele.  The figures in this book, including the author writing autobiographically,  are alive as you and me.  They ask to be heard, seen, known, recognized, remembered. –Alicia Ostriker, author of The Holy and Broken Bliss . “Not I brings to life the fully-rounded experience of women whose lives occupy a corner of Jane Saginaw’s own inner being. With deftly rendered detail of memory,  sensory experience and emotion, she invites her reader to be, for a moment, not I but you, and through that, you become part of another and of her. You will be engaged, transported and transformed by these powerful poems.” –Alan Morinis, Founder, The Mussar Institute . “In this powerful and deeply original poetry collection, Jane Saginaw gives voice to women whose lives, losses, and inner worlds continue to reverberate across generations. This striking collection connects women not only to one another, but also to the reader, and to the enduring contemporary relevance of Holocaust memory. With vivid, contemplative language and innovative form, these poems move between tenderness and terror, music and death, daily life and unimaginable rupture. In doing so, they capture not only the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also the fragile beauty of the ordinary worlds that preceded, endured, and echoed beyond it. Moving across histories, geographies, and generations—from Monastir to Budapest to Warsaw, and into Saginaw’s own coming-of-age as a young Jewish girl in the 1970s and beyond—these poems illuminate the interconnectedness of life, pain, resilience, and remembrance. These poems are not only acts of remembrance but acts of intimate witnessing, allowing often forgotten women to speak again, while also reflecting the poet’s own journey. This is a powerful, original, and deeply affecting collection. Saginaw’s poems invite the reader into an intimate encounter with the women at their center, allowing their voices to linger long after the page is turned. This is a haunting, innovative, and unforgettable collection.” –Sarah Valente, Newman Director, Wasserman Jewish Studies Center Baruch College, City University of New York . In Not I‘s opening poem, Saginaw implies that her American life renders her ill equipped to speak of the Shoah. Yet, in the tender persona poems that follow, Saginaw provides intimate and deeply moving vignettes depicting the lives of a handful of female survivors. Along the way, this wise poet skillfully weaves in her own rich story of a very different kind of survival across the ocean. –Yehoshua November    Please share/please repost  #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook