The Obedient Door

Poetry. THE OBEDIENT DOOR was written in the belief that a poem should have its hands everywhere in your life, especially in the parts that jar. Then the poem is the compromise, where what you didn't write and the knots you can't solve both exist, and the words are unstable messengers. Finney's influences include Ashbery, Beckett, Lorca, and Chinese, Japanese, and Islamic poetry. THE OBEDIENT DOOR issues from a desire to know the past and its languages, to find alternatives, new lexicons, other people's boundaries to force words between. John Ashbery suggests that readers of this book will "feast on the scraps so eloquently assembled for us, which are in fact those of life itself."