Now Available from
Final Thursday Press
Kyrie
Poetry by Jonathan Stull
For poet Jonathan Stull, observing the natural world can be a means toward understanding, and that is both the beauty and terror of nature. “My poems come from actual places and events in time, and they explore what meaning the moment is revealing. To me poetry reflects the underlying music and absolute inner connectedness of all things.”
Marvin Bell, the Poet Laureate of Iowa, has praised Stull’s work as “central to the midwestern circumstance, in touch with what awake people feel deep within, and bearing vigilance and compassion.” Bell finds that Stull’s poems “embody the beauty and dynamism of the natural world.”
Kyrie is a signed and numbered edition limited to 500 copies.
$6.00 32 pgs. 8 1/2 by 5 1/2.
ISBN 0-9742764-1-3
Ghost Wars
Poetry by Vince Gotera
***Winner of the 2004 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry***
In Ghost Wars, Vince Gotera, Editor at the North American Review, brings together a career of poetic considerations about the experience of war and its aftermath in this timely chapbook. Denise Duhamel writes "The poems in Ghost Wars are the tickers off the bottom of CNN's screen pushing out of the TV and flourishing like vines in our living rooms." Allison Joseph notes "Lively, compassionate, and intelligent, the poems of Ghost Wars are a necessary balm for our uncertain national psyche."
Ghost Wars is a signed and numbered edition limited to 500 copies.
$5.00 32 pgs. 8 1/2 by 5 1/2
ISBN 0-9742764-0-5
Laugh. Damnit.
Poetry by Ahkos
Feeling pretentious? Walk away now. The poems in this collection target poetic self-importance with humor and a bit of an edge. Formed in (and in response to) Boston's open mic scene, "Laugh. Damnit." will make you smile, or else.
$1.00 16 pgs.
Bad Men
Microfiction by Jim O'Loughlin
Four short short stories that made their debut at the Final Thursday Reading Series. They weren't originally intended to be part of a collection; it just happened that way. Find out what happens to the lounge lizard, the ex-con, the slacker student, and the serial monogamist.
$2.00 18 pgs.
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Vibe
is located at 909 W. 23rd St. in Cedar Falls on the second floor of
Bought again Books.
Persons needing access accommodation should call 266-7115 by the
day before the event. For more information, contact
Jim O'Loughlin.
from "Mortal Fear"
by John Wilson Swope
My teacher's in-service day had ended at noon, so I drove the 250 miles for a weekend at home, arriving in time for supper with Mom, Dad, and my older brother. Nothing about the menu, the way I set the round kitchen table, or the conversation was extraordinary. Only Dad's quiet manner.
"Ralph," Mom asked, "is there something wrong with your dinner?"
"No. I saw Dr. Mandanis today."
John Mandanis had become Dad’s cardiologist nine years earlier following surgery to remove the upper lobe of his lung. Afterwards, he’d seen oncologists and internists several times a year. For Dad, visits to Dr. Mandanis had become routine.
He stared down at the plate before him––a hard, fixed stare that should burn holes in its target. His eyes glassy, he looked up and away from the three of us sitting at the other compass points of the table. Great sobs broke his speech with the suddenness of hail falling from a summer storm.
"He––he wants––me to go––back into the hospital on Monday."
I silently reconstructed his words. Mom moved first, kneeling beside his chair and hugging him to her as she had us children so many times. Ralph Jr. and I looked at each other and then stared at our own plates. I didn’t want to hear what I had heard.
When the storm subsided, Dad slumped into his chair, exhausted.
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