After the Three Moon Era

Gary Fincke

Winner of the 2015 Jacar Press Poetry Book Prize

In After the Three Moon Era, Gary Fincke keeps returning to the missing, the vanished, the disappeared. The speaker of his sharply-etched poems is a man in late middle age, caught between a grandchild who whirls unafraid on an open staircase and a disheartened father of ninety who asks, “What’s next?” Fincke brings a penetrating gaze and an elegiac tenderness to the telling “news items” he discovers in a world haunted by intimations of mortality

Chana Bloch, author of Swimming in the Rain, New & Selected Poems, 1980-2015

Gary Fincke’s sweeping After the Three Moon Era is a razor-edged investigation of our modern reality: its wars and chemical plants, its familial aches and obligations, its daily reminders of mortality’s inescapable pull. These poems see clear-eyed into the darkness, but maintain an abiding wonder at the mysteries (the earth’s once-upon-a-time three moons; sinkholes’ habit of appearing on Thursdays) that grace our mundane lives so that they, like these poems, quietly glow. Incisive, empathetic, and arresting, this is an absolute knockout of a book

Catherine Pierce, author of The Girls of Peculiar and Famous Last Words