SELINSGROVE -- Local poet Gary Fincke has a talent for making the unfamiliar feel like home.

Fincke tunes all of his keen senses on and doesn't ever shut them off in his newly-released full-length book of poetry, "The Fire Landscape."

You weren't standing in the crowd for the Kent State shooting, you likely didn't know anyone hurt or killed, but Fincke makes you feel the gravity of that 38-year-old day, the weight of three generations of men, three lifetimes of looking back at the places and events that forever change us.

In this, his 10th book of poetry, Fincke aims for the autobiographical. The Susquehannna University Writers' Institute Director has penned poems that feel more like memoirs, each grounded in the history of post-atomic America.

"And my mother? After each game, she checked for ticks because didn't I know we were things that fed them, publicizing our blood with sweat and heat and breath. Look,' my father said, He'll get over it,' meaning it wasn't polio, that I was saved like Ike, who ran again, giving Nixon four years to wait," Fincke writes in "Bad Time," a poem ostensibly about President Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack that pulses with the deeper implications of a child's first brush with mortality.

Fincke's release of "The Fire Landscape" drew interest from National Public Radio's Garrison Keillor, who pulled the poem "The Sorrows" out for his radio show and podcast.

His new book of poetry also dovetails with Fincke's recent naming as a Degenstein Professor -- one of the highest honors the university can bestow upon a faculty member.

"These poems are more autobiographical than the poems in my other collections, I think. They're more grounded in a chronological sequence," Fincke said. "The seed of the poems is almost always some kind of personal memory."

Fincke says he drew early inspiration for his brand of narrative, Pittsburgh-rooted poetry from blue-collar poets like Philip Levine and James Wright. Now the multi-genre writer has himself generated a kind of following: Since its inception in 1996, the Susquehanna University Writers' Institute -- a program Fincke has cultivated since day one -- has grown from nine writing majors to 144 and is now touted as one of the best writing programs in the country.

If you're interested in Fincke's work, you can pick up a copy of "The Fire Landscape" at Amazon.com. In the meantime, Fincke says, he'll be working on his eleventh book of poetry.

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