The collection features poems inspired by a wide spectrum of films, from 1950s B-movies to acclaimed horror classics. Fincke explores themes of fear, nostalgia, and the impact of cinema on our lives, blending vivid imagery with emotional depth. Each poem serves as a reflection on the cultural significance of these films, offering readers a unique lens through which to appreciate both the art of poetry and the world of cinema.
Exploring the complexities of human emotion, this collection features ordinary individuals grappling with pivotal decisions shaped by personal trauma, anger, and desire. Through keen observation, each short story delves into themes of cultural shifts and the intricacies of work and relationships, transforming everyday struggles into profound narratives that resonate deeply with readers.
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.”
Moving at surprising angles between the personal and the public world, Gary Fincke’s poems lead to discoveries that are both exhilarating and unsettling. In long sequences and precisely observed shorter poems, he explores terrorism, mass hysteria, climate change, political calamity, and the necessity of sustaining belief. He references science and history as well as myth. He grounds his poems in experience. Gary Fincke’s poems speak to the reader with an urgency driven by the elusiveness of truth.
These poems begin in the coming-of-age moments that change us by forcing recognition of physical weakness, the power of sex. the importance of family, the presence of evil, and the prevalence of mortality. The book opens with narratives taken primarily from childhood and then, divided by long poem sequences, moves to adulthood and confrontation with the identity we acquire through close relationships and the pressures of our appetites, finally ending with what reads as a universal prayer of redemption. "Writing Letters for the Blind presents the reader with visions of this world and all its beauty and sordidness, joy and disappointment. This poet reports the breaking news just in from the heart and soul, and the body as well."My father has taught me the beatitudes of sight," Fincke tells us, always aware of what we owe to those who brought us here. He stays up through the starry darkness in the insomnia of one who feels it his duty to pay passionate attention, a poet engaged in "the basic defense of simple things."