Gary Fincke

In these twelve intelligent tales, seasoned poet and story writer Gary Fincke reconciles lost hope and quiet despair with small blessings and ultimate redemption. In his world, as easily as one man becomes a hero, another is riddled with failure. Fincke weaves together the large and small tragedies of daily life to create an inescapable, yet at times oddly comforting, reality. His characters inhabit a world of strip malls and fast-food joints, low-down jobs and physical ailments, lottery tickets and cheap beer. Here, everyone and everything is suspicious, and only the luck of the draw determines who, if anyone, will survive. In the title story, Ben, a fifty-year-old bookstore clerk facing the possibility of prostate cancer, feels his life spiraling out of control as he endures his female doctor's examinations with childlike embarrassment on the one hand and struggles to conceal his age from his teenybopper coworkers on the other. Ben's only consolation is that "every day he heard about something a hundred times worse." In "Gatsby, Tender, Paradise," Bridgeford encounters a group of lightning strike and electrocution victims and feels lucky to have survived several light-switch shocks—the same type of shocks that have permanently disabled one man in the group. Such are the small but important blessings that ultimately rescue Fincke's characters from despair. Here at last is someone who can articulate both our constant, mortal desire to transcend ordinary experience and our simultaneous comfort in the unremarkable and familiar.

The Fire Landscape is a series of poem sequences that chronicle a wide variety of coming-of-age moments from childhood in the 1950s through the beginning of the 21st century. These deeply layered, complex narrative poems are connected by close personal observation of place and time but also by the politics of the Cold War and its aftermath, including a sequence driven by the May 4, 1970, shooting of students by the National Guard at Kent State where Gary Fincke was a student at the time.

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 tone, 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."

A university maintenance worker and his wife decide to give birth to their anencephalic baby and to accept all the consequences that will follow. During summer vacation, a journalism student trysts with his girlfriend at her suspicious father's house and soon witnesses the ultimate in paternal vengeance. A schoolboy faces peer violence while his mother struggles with cancer, each relying upon a hopelessly misplaced faith. In The Stone Child, Gary Fincke presents characters at turning points, where the effects of their decisions will ripple throughout the rest of their lives. ""Clean Shaven"" depicts the last family vacation of a couple with two nearly grown children; in a few pivotal days, Reynolds, the father, struggles with, accepts, then embraces, his comradeship with his roguish, college-expelled son. In ""Natural Borders,"" the way a small-town sheriff handles the marital problems of a pair of eccentrics leads to a conflagration that will haunt him forever. The eleven stories in The Stone Child are about families of varying kinds, what binds them, and what threatens to tear them apart. Under pressure, the characters strive to maintain whatever connections they have established with one another. In important ways, all of these stories, even those with exclusively adult characters, are coming-of-age tales, the characters arriving at those points in their lives when what they do and say will mark significant passages. Fincke brings great humanity to his characters and displays a sharp and wry sense of humor; his sense of place is strong, his stories richly textured, and his prose a joy to read. Primarily meditating on the viewpoints of male characters, Fincke gives us stories with beginnings that pull us right in and endings that won't let us leave the world of the story until long after we have finished reading.

Troubled relationships between parents and children provide the framework for many stories in this collection.

"A nostalgic trip through American culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s . . . . Draft dodging, the nuclear threat, and Martin Luther King, Jr. are among the major issues evoked, but the stories also vividly depict the popular culture of an era."--Library Journal