“Standing around the Heart shows Gary Fincke at his inimitable best, careless of fads and schools, handy with a great range of subjects, but, at the core, Romantic, preternaturally alert, fond of stories, and as drawn to wisdom as to comedy. Fincke writes a poetry of abiding generosity, of true feeling and thought. His is an essential American voice.”
—Rodney Jones, author of The Kingdom of the Instant and Transparent Gestures
“For Fincke, knowledge leads us to the heart, to joy and sorrow—and the result is always a marvelous poetry that is both accessible and yet strange, both true and yet mysterious.”
—Andrew Hudgins, Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State University and author of Ecstatic in the Poison
“No ideas come detached from things in this book which begins with animal hearts and ends with the dark socket where the World Trade Towers once stood. In between, the poems enact a journey through personal memories and public histories, the mess and wreck of America’s twentieth century set against the fragility of human bodies and dreams. These are mostly poems of a generation—the Baby Boom—and of place—the Penn sylvania of second- and third-generation immigrant laborers. History may be one damned thing after another, but this book shows that the broken things of this world can be made to mean and sometimes even shine.”
—Julia Kasdorf, author of Eve’s Striptease and Sleeping Preacher