Gary Fincke

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have won prizes from Ohio State, Arkansas, Michigan State, Stephen F. Austin, and Jacar Press. Individual poems have received the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, been reprinted twice by Harper’s, and been selected for a Pushcart Prize. His books in other genres have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the Elixir Press Fiction Prize, and the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Nonfiction. Since 1984, he has published forty books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, including a novel-in-stories How Blasphemy Sounds to God and the memoir Amp’d: A Father’s Backstage Pass, an account of immersing himself in his younger son’s life as the lead guitarist of the platinum-selling rock band Breaking Benjamin. He is the Emeritus Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, where he founded and then directed, for more than twenty years, the Writers Institute and the nationally recognized undergraduate creative writing major.

Praise for The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025

Spanning nearly half a century of work, this Selected Poems makes clear exactly why Gary Fincke is one of America’s most significant contemporary poets. No one plumbs mystery’s dark like Gary Fincke, no one does bracing tenderness like Gary Fincke, and no one tends the house of memory with more rigor and insight than Gary Fincke. I couldn’t put this book down. The Necessary Going On is an essential collection.

—Catherine Pierce, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, 2021-2025

In world-encompassing and often syllabic narrative poems that commingle history and science with love and anxiety, all toward “recording / The insistent turbulence of desire,” Gary Fincke engages these times, our times, with relentless interrogations of contemporary consciousness, even “The startling language of shriveling leaves / And the careful chorus of our clothing.” Understanding and confronting that “what we are is temporary,” this gathering of work written over forty years demonstrates again and again Fincke’s insistence on faith in the tremulous connections among us and how, despite the violence of this age, of any age, we go on “to sing our songs of endurance.” A compelling and authoritative collection.

—Michael Waters, author of Sinnerman and others

The breadth and scope of Gary Fincke’s poems astonish me. He is the chronicler of the everyday in a way that elevates the whole idea of poetry. You can’t help but go with him to Centralia, where the underground fires still burn, to the deaf, the stuttering, spiritualists, the Brownian movement, as well as to the complicated relation of father and son. If I were to locate a center of gravity in this new collection it would be the delicate, loving, study of what it means to be a man, a husband, a father, a witness to the damages the world inflicts. A world where here is no cure but the bare and brave attention these poems offer. Having seen, what to do then? You might keep to the center of the room where the AIDS patients lie lined up in beds, or you could come close, with these poems, and feel “the joy of sweetness / despite the clear foreshadowing.”

—Fleda Brown, Poet Laureate of Delaware, 2001-2007