Debut Poetry Collection by Fiancée of US Poet Laureate Billy Collins

FINISHING LINE PRESS
Providing a Place for Today’s Poets Since 1998

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Finishing Line Press announces a new limited-edition title in its critically-acclaimed poetry Chapbook Series: I Will Meet You at the River by Florida author Suzannah Gilman, who was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry. Gilman happens to be the fiancée of Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States.

With a BA in English and a minor in Writing with honors from Rollins College and a Juris Doctor from the University of Florida under her belt, Gilman is a licensed attorney who is as comfortable in front of a bookstore audience as she is in front of a filled courtroom. She has taken a sabbatical from law, concentrating on writing. A writer before she was a lawyer, Gilman has been publishing poems for over 20 years.

The poems in Gilman’s collection chronicle romantic relationships (some real, some fanciful) in their many moods and stages, going full-circle from the thrill and discovery of new love to the dread one feels when the “right” partner is realized to be the wrong one, to the promise of another chance at love, along with some of the hurts and dramas and passions that can occur along the way. (Gilman was married for over 20 years and has raised four children who are now adults.)

Other poets have these words for Gilman’s collection:

The elegant poems in I Will Meet You at the River begin in pain and end in hope. The images are precise. The trouble that attaches to them bridges the vastness that separates Paris from St. Paul the Apostle, or lemon peels from Latvia. For all their keenness of insight and all their beauty, what these poems offer most of all is pleasure.

- Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil's Territory

I Will Meet You at the River traces the slow, miraculous coming into being of love. Anyone fortunate enough to have loved like this will remember the sense of wonder and disbelief that touches each of these poems. Passionate, wise, and funny, this lovely debut collection reminds us that the familiar world at any moment can ambush us with ecstasy.

- George Bilgere, author of The White Museum

In Suzannah Gilman’s desire-soaked lyrics, the natural world— a “watery sky,” the “tones of jays,” or “the hanging scent of fallen leaves”— manifests itself in a sensory swirl, though so gem-like are these images they lose nothing in clarity. When heartbreak, desire’s shadow, sets in, and “the gardener knows / something has got to give,” Gilman’s marvel at the wondrous textures of the world still prevails. To dig as this collection does into the “marriage between / root and earth” is to risk a few blisters, but oh! those blisters “break open and bleed” like flowers.

- Julie Sheehan, winner of the Whiting Award for poetry



I Will Meet You at the River by Suzannah Gilman is a limited edition 26-page, 6” by 9”, soft-cover chapbook with saddle-stitch binding. Cover art is used with permission of Getty Images. Cover design by Claire Zoghb. Author photo by Lee Vandergrift.

Retail price: $14.

Publication Date: May 10, 2013.

Pre-orders may be placed now.

ISBN: 978-1-62229-209-7

Media kit available from author via email.

To pre-order online, go to www.finishinglinepress.com or www.suzannahgilman.com or you may order directly from the publisher by mailing a check or money order to: Finishing Line Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown, KY 40324.

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 Satellite Beach by Florida native Susan Lilley, Flame by Terry Godbey, and Sound Travels on Water by Kyle Potvin.

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Leah Maines
Chapbook Series Editor
Finishing Line Press
PO Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324
(859) 514-8966
LeahMaines@aol.com

Suzannah Gilman, Author
(407) 927-3255 Phone
(407) 637-5333 Facsimile
suzannahgilman@gmail.com

This release was published on openPR.