Gary Fincke’s new collection is a poetry grounded in memorable places and characters. He wants readers to remember the
voices they hear in the poems, the work the characters do, the families they have, the things they believe in and strive to live up to. There is also a sense of the larger world layered into nearly every poem— history, politics, science, culture. Here too are poems about the mysteries of adolescence, capturing moments of youthful dreaming and wishing.
Told in a confiding and conversational tone with lyrical intensity, these are very accessible and inviting poems about the way we redeem ourselves daily, a poetry that, as distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch put it, “memorializes the past and honors the life lived.”
Gary Fincke is a professor of English and director of the Writers’ Institute at Susquehanna University. He has published sixteen books of poetry and short fiction as well as Amp’d, a memoir, about his son’s rock band. He has won numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction for his collection, Sorry I Worried You. Among his previous poetry collections are Writing Letters for the Blind, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award, and Almanac for Desire. He was also the coach of his university’s men’s tennis team for twenty years.
“Standing around the Heart shows Gary Fincke at his inimitable best, careless of fads and schools, handy with a great range of subjects, but, at the core, Romantic, preternaturally alert, fond of stories, and as drawn to wisdom as to comedy. Fincke writes a poetry of abiding generosity, of true feeling and thought. His is an essential American voice.”
—Rodney Jones, author of The Kingdom of the Instant and Transparent Gestures
“For Fincke, knowledge leads us to the heart, to joy and sorrow—and the result is always a marvelous poetry that is both accessible and yet strange, both true and yet mysterious.”
—Andrew Hudgins, Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State University and author of Ecstatic in the Poison
“No ideas come detached from things in this book which begins with animal hearts and ends with the dark socket where the World Trade Towers once stood. In between, the poems enact a journey through personal memories and public histories, the mess and wreck of America’s twentieth century set against the fragility of human bodies and dreams. These are mostly poems of a generation—the Baby Boom—and of place—the Penn sylvania of second- and third-generation immigrant laborers. History may be one damned thing after another, but this book shows that the broken things of this world can be made to mean and sometimes even shine.”
—Julia Kasdorf, author of Eve’s Striptease and Sleeping Preacher
