Finishing Line Press

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Hungry Girl by Veronica Sanitate

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Every family possesses its own grammar of love and silence. In Hungry Girl, Veronica Sanitate exposes the hidden syntax of both, tracing the fine black threads that bind mothers to daughters, old worlds to new ones, injury to repair. Elsewhere, the natural world presses in with its own urgencies—birds crying at dusk, insects battering against glass—as histories of Italian migration and Midwestern domestic life surface in fragments. These exquisitely crafted poems move with quiet authority, revealing how love, silence, and obligation are stitched into the body long before they are understood. At once intimate and expansive, these poems illuminate the hidden seams that bind generations together—and the ways they are remade.

Veronica Sanitate is also the author of The Palindrome of the Sun (Finishing Line Press, 2026) and holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program. Her poetry manuscript Sun Standing Still was shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Sanitate serves as Vice President of Ocean Organics Corp. and is a founding director of both the Michigan Collaborative for Mindfulness in Education and Groundcover News, a street newspaper focused on homelessness solutions. The seventh child of Italian immigrants, she was born and raised in Detroit and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband.

PRAISE:

Veronica Sanitate’s Hungry Girl is a book of remarkable restraint and startling consequence. These poems understand that silence is never empty; it is sewn into families, carried across oceans, passed from mother to daughter like a volatile heirloom. Yet this collection is not a story of submission. Through its luminous “Black Stitch” sequence and unforgettable lyric portraits, Hungry Girl transforms inheritance into revelation with extraordinary precision, making speech from what generations could not say.
–Katherine Larson, author of Wedding of the Foxes

While Veronica Sanitate‘s Hungry Girl is a matrilineal tale, one can’t help but recall the force with which Athena sprung from her father’s head when reading these remarkable poems. This collection, admirably concise and angular in its arrangement, is both elegy for this mother and a reckoning that leads her daughter into the light. Join me in welcoming the powerful entry of this girl-woman’s voice into the world.
–Cate Marvin, author of Event Horizon

It is the nature of poetry to dig into emotional or spiritual depths. Usually it explores the individual as he or she encounters their personal selves or as he or she encounters their spiritual or transcendent selves. Veronica’s poetry beautifully and accurately fuses both.
–John Friedlander, author of Psychic Psychology

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New from Finishing Line Press: MOLTEN ARTS AND MEMORIES by Elizabeth Shafer

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Both literal and metaphorical aspects of “molten”are explored in MOLTEN ARTS AND MEMORIES, by Elizabeth Shafer. In Part I Ms. Shafer describes her fascination with the Fayum Egyptian encaustic tomb portraits and her journey in learning encaustic painting. Then she turns to molten aspects of other arts, such as those of poets, past and present, whose work has particularly influenced her. She then portrays molten links between her love of painting and of places like India and Italy. In Part II she describes both ardent and leaden aspects of “molten” in remembering scenes of Riverside Park in Manhattan and in her memories of family members.

Elizabeth Shafer is a writer, artist, and retired lawyer. Her chapbook, WELLSPRINGS, was published by The Finishing Line Press in 2019. She was a contributor in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2014. In her art she has worked in various media such as fresco, printmaking, pastels, and watercolor. She has focused on oil painting and, most recently, encaustics. She had a solo art exhibition at the Saugerties Public Library in 2019. As a former lawyer, she continues to serve on the Board of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, and is a member of the Saugerties Conservation Advisory Commission. She lives with her husband and their dog on their sheep farm in Saugerties, New York. Social Media: Instagram

PRAISE:

“Molten Arts and Memories” is Elizabeth Shafer’s eloquent testament to her blended life as a poet and a painter. In one of her opening poems she describes her experiments with the ancient and potentially dangerous art of encaustic. The painter is literally playing with fire, and that image is threaded throughout the book. The poems are intimate, they probe deep, and hold a stunning amount of heat. They’re ringed with magma —molten, simmering under the surface, boiling forth in unexpected corners of our overheated earth and in the shadows of history and in memory. Shafer’s topics range wide — there is war, despair, joy, loss, regret, and of course there is always always beauty. The lasting impression is of a poet/painter driven to live in truth, to hold her hand to the fire, and to flinch at nothing.
–Josepha Gutelius, author of Rapt Meat and To the Perfect Love Which Prepares a Table Beyond Us


Elizabeth Shafer’s poems are like living landscapes in a molten world, fused with encaustic heat and luminous colors, aglow with pain and glory. But as a collection, Molten Arts and Memories also becomes a lyric memoir with operatic overtones, reflecting on family tragedy, the “glad fast dance” of motherhood, endless war, Anna Karenina at the train station, and the many players in an examined life.
—Jan Alexander, author of Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization

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