standing around the heart
university of arkansas press (february 2005)

Gary Fincke’s newest collection of poetry, Standing Around the Heart is grounded in memorable places and characters. In Standing Around the Heart, Fincke compels his readers to remember the voices they hear in these poems, the work his characters do, the families his characters have, and the things they believe in and strive to live up to. Fincke’s poems force their inhabitants to recognize that they must rely on themselves, and their effort to do so is what ultimately redeems them.

Throughout Standing Around the Heart, there is a sense of a larger world layered into Fincke’s poetry—a world of history, politics, science, and culture—connecting his poems to his readers regardless of their particular experiences. Many are poems about the mysteries of adolescence, retrospective poems that reveal a world of youthful dreaming and wishing. Standing Around the Heart is free verse poetry, conversational in tone and marked by a unique lyrical intensity.

"This collection 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

"For Fincke, knowledge leads us to the heart, to joy and sorrow—and the result is always marvelous poetry that is both accessible and yet strange, both true and yet mysterious."

—Andrew Hudgins, author of Ecstatic in the Poison

"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 Sleeping Preacher