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BLUE ELECTRODE

PRESS RELEASE

PRESS RELEASE

FINISHING LINE PRESS

FinishlingBooks@aol.com

www.finishinglinepress.com

PO Box 1626 Georgetown, KY 40324

📷

For Immediate Release Finishing Line Press announces the publication of

BLUE ELECTRODE, Poems, by Margaret Barbour Gilbert

In BLUE ELECTRODE, the poet uses her own experience as an analogue of contemporary Southern history.

Ralph Burns, author of but not yet (Lynx House Press, 2017) Winner of The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, & Ghost Notes (Oberlin College Press, 2000), Winner of The Field Poetry Prize, writes,

“These poems interrogate seizure disorder and recovery, its spectrum, the people around it, family, community. In those waters swim a sense of history, distortion, victimhood, the inevitability of scapegoating, in fact, discrimination and racism. The poems themselves seize. Their strongest light is their willingness to inhabit the very “kindling” of the neurons, “the highway clothed in goldenrod.” Indeed, as the poet writes in “Blue Electrode,” the title poem, “Yes, my mother thinks to herself/ tying her torn scarf/ the words Epilepsy and Woe/ are synonymous.”

Mary Stewart Hammond, author of Out of Canaan (W.W. Norton, 1991) & Entering History (W.W. Norton, 2016), writes:

“The poet's work to establish agency in the midst of sickness is so clear and hard fought, that one is filled with admiration and wonderment at the ability to carry the reader so deep into her journey with all of its subcurrents.”

Stephanie Emily Dickinson, author of Heat (New Michigan Press, 2013) & Blue Swan Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2021), also writes:

"Recapturing Anna Karenina......is really an epic. Incredible. Mrs. Walker is such a figure, a malign force in the house. The chicken, too... cut up, dismembered lives. I am amazed at how the poems work together and create mood. The old south becoming the new south and the violence in the gesture and word. Like "Eating a Piece of Black Bottom Pie." I should think considering the times ---this book could get attention."

The cover for Ms. Gilbert's new book features a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Woman at the Mirror (1912). The artist has used the brilliant device of a broken mirror which reflects a slanting image of the woman.

Influenced by Sylvia Plath and James Dickey, Ms. Gilbert, in her free verse poems, explores themes of violence, otherness, and alienation. Her poem "Eating Oatmeal" is included in the Everyman Pocket Poets anthology, Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (2007). She is also the author of a chapbook, My Grandmother's Engagement Ring (2014), published by Finishing Line Press, and her poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Mudfish, Crazyhorse, The Examined Life Journal, and elsewhere. Her play, A SCENE OF CAPTIVITY WITH WALTZES AND MIRRORS, was staged at Harvard's Agassiz Theatre twice.

Finishing Line Press is a poetry publisher based in Georgetown, Kentucky. In addition to the Chapbook Series, it publishes the New Women’s Voices Series and sponsors the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition. Other recent Finishing Line Press releases include Man Overboard by Steven Barza, Scared Money Never Wins by Julia Wendell, Putting in a Window by John Brantingham, Family Business by Paula Sergi, and Drawing Lessons by Carol Barrett. Finishing Line Press and editor Leah Maines were featured in both the 2001 and 2002 Poet’s Markets.

Publication Date: August, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64662-540-6

To order online, go to http://www.finishinglinepress.comOr, you may order directly from the publisher, $14.99, check or money order to:

Finishing Line Books PO Box 1626 Georgetown, KY 40324 finishingbooks@aol.com

You can also contact the author, Margaret Barbour Gilbert, by email at margaretbarbourgilbert@gmail.com.

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