Gary Fincke is a professor of English and director of the Writers’ Institute at Susquehanna University. He has published sixteen books of poetry and short fiction as well as Amp’d, a memoir, about his son’s rock band. He has won numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction for his collection, Sorry I Worried You. Among his previous poetry collections are Writing Letters for the Blind, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award, and Almanac for Desire. He was also the coach of his university’s men’s tennis team for twenty years.

About Standing around the Heart:

"Standing around the Heart 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

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

"No ideas come detached from things in this book which begins with animal hearts and ends with the dark socket where the World Trade Towers once stood. In between, the poems enact a journey through personal memories and public histories, the mess and wreck of America's twentieth century set against the fragility of human bodies and dreams. These are mostly poems of a generation—the Baby Boom—and of place—the Pensylvania of second- and third-generation immigrant laborers. 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