The new and selected stories in this collection, written over a period of thirty years, are firmly entrenched in the culture and people of rust belt cities and rural Appalachia. These stories are often set against large, significant events like the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Kent State shootings, but are always uniquely local. A mother fends off the police by brandishing copperhead snakes. A woman cares for the dog of an alleged double murderer. A husband who has lost his job works at trying to save his wife from a debilitating phobia. This extensive collection by Gary Fincke, an accomplished poet and writer of fiction, gives rise to ordinary people living lives made fascinating by attention to the particulars of voice, place, and character. With precise language, surprising imagery, and sharp, evocative dialog, these stories deepen beyond the oddities of their characters, who are scarred and defeated by circumstance and choice, but also attain moments of grace, compassion, and generosity of the spirit.

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 FinckeA a¬a 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 poemA a¬ahistory, 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, A a¬Amemorializes the past and honors the life lived.A a¬A

In these essays, Gary Fincke combines a journalist's relentless investigations into the darkest corners of the human condition with an academic's love for arcana. In one essay, almost forgotten homeopathic recipes from the pantries of Pennsylvania Dutch country are interwoven with the panicked absurdities of elementary school health classes in the 1960s. In another, old case files of small town murders intertwine with meditations on all the fears, large and small, that accompany parenting. In The Darkness Call, Fincke plumbs the depths- child abuse, violence, illness, grief- not for their sadness but for moments of courage, hope, empathy, and light.

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke's sixth collection of short stories contain newsworthy events that are chronicled secondhand: the shooting of a policeman, the murder of a house flipper, the firing of a teacher for punching a violent student, the accidental drowning of a gay man in a flood, and a fire somewhat accidently set by a juvenile smoker in a school. Despite these surprising events, the narrator of each story is an ordinary person caught up in the action but preoccupied by other things, whether zombie movies, collecting unusual words, the oddity of other people's sexual habits, or what to do in retirement. These shocking incidents become both central and peripheral to the narrative, as Fincke portrays the fluctuating emotions and self-protective reflections of fathers, sons, and husbands, creating a world where individuals rarely understand each other, yet still arrive at moments of compassion, tolerance, perseverance, and familial love.

"Coal burns underground and destroys a small town. A woman confronts police officers with her pet copperheads. A young girl drinks Drano. A man is banned from his favorite bar. "Within these eleven short stories, Flannery O'Connor Award winner and poet Gary Fincke brings into focus the small struggles of ordinary people. The characters within this collection, from boys and girls to fathers, mothers, and the aging, live in cities, in towns, and in rural areas. Yet, no matter the surroundings, all seem alone within a collective anxiety. Set against extraordinary events, such as the Three Mile Island accident, the Challenger Disaster, and the Kennedy assassination, these stories personalize history through a juxtaposition between large and small tragedies and the unflinching desire to find insight within and redemption from weakness and shortcoming.

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, most of them adults or at least in their late teens, provide the framework for many stories in this collection. In "Faculty X," a middle-aged son witnesses his mother's fixation with death and her attempt to cope with senility. "If I lose my glasses for good, you have to promise me you'll buy another pair just like them. I can't be buried without my glasses. I wouldn't be myself." In "Keeping Nice," Greg Haskins deals with his conflicting emotions of "contempt" for his aging mother's obsession to keep her belongings "nice" by covering them with plastic and his own fear of the uncontrollable forces around him.Both "Callback" and the moving title story, "Emergency Calls," explore the anxieties of parents trying to balance the need to protect their teenage children with the task of making them accountable for their own often self-destructive actions. "Darwin in the City" centers on a man's paranoia and anxiety attacks over everything from hearing his wife gurgle her last breath into her pillow to the impending blindness that he knows will be his fate. In "The Tabloid Strategy" an elderly man is determined to create a new beginning for himself. "'I'm running for office, ' Lou Gorski said to his daughter on his seventy-first birthday. 'I'm starting my second life.'" The reader soon discovers, however, that starting a second life isn't quite that simple.With vivid description and compelling dialogue, Gary Fincke pulls the reader deep into these stories and into the lives of these unforgettable characters. "Emergency Calls" is a masterful collection by a truly gifted writer.

Gary Fincke's The Sorrows explores the human dynamics, gone wrong and right, of family, of loss for women who never 'said they needed their husbands to come back from the dead,' of the ghosts that populate the world. There are filthy people in the world of sorrows, collecting porn and drinking beer; racist and sexist, dangerous and blind despite the disasters. Yet, the grotesque often brings the saints through the darkness to redemptive light, and Fincke is adept at guiding his reader toward such consolation. After all, the reader is 'someone who needed me. Or, at least, a presence, a voice.'

The poems in Bringing Back the Bones are startling intheir inclusiveness, juxtaposing history, science, myth,and popular culture with a narrative thread that risesfrom memory. Groups of distinctively individual poemsalternate with long poem sequences that range fromone based upon the difficulties of genius to one thatcontemplates the wondrous things that literally fall fromthe sky to the tile sequence, a meditation on the desirefor permanence. As Robert Cording, author of Against Consolationand Common Life says, "Gary Fincke finds the wordsfor that lone, long labor of our lives that shapes who webecome and readies us for those moments when the`possibility of happiness/surprise[s] us.' He combinesthe empathy of Philip Levine for our ordinary livesand the thinking intelligence of Carl Dennis. His greatgift, like Levine's and Dennis', is the way he so casuallyconnects his own life to those worlds, his poems alwaysconvincing the reader with their intelligence, with theirsubtle wit and humor, and with their deep feeling asthey simultaneously strive for a history of permanenceand comically acknowledge our human failures."

Vanishings is a stunning collection of autobiographical narratives that propel us into the life and mind of a literary genius.

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke’s Nothing Falls from Nowhere contain events told by an ordinary person caught up in the mundane action of day to day living but preoccupied by the dismal prospects life has to offer. These shocking accounts become both central and peripheral to the narrative, as Fincke portrays the fluctuating emotions and self-protective reflections of fathers, sons, and husbands, creating a world where individuals infrequently comprehend the actions of others, yet often attain salvation during moments of compassion, acceptance, resolution, and dissolution of love.