Final Deployment is a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. The poems in it were written over six years, from my days of self-study in poetry, through some wonderful classes at UMBC with Lia Purpura, and into my first year of graduate school. The cover photo is of a piece called "A Thousand Tiny Deaths," by my sister, Jeanne Quinn.

"From the hills of San Diego to the Live Oaks of Pensacola come poems of a sympathetic imagination. We follow the child of a naval aviator, during the Vietnam era, to the woman she will become. Self-reflection starts in the mind and ends on the page with clear bold words that are trailblazers for a world otherwise unnoticed. Quinn links the arteries of the past with perception and experience that become a moral arbiter – a heart clutching read – each moment in this poet’s history is a sensory one with daydreams and acoustics that come alive interpreting, not imitating, the world. This is what real writing is: spirit and sense, decent loving, an inimitable life, the shining accomplishment of a major debut."
Grace Cavalieri
“The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress”

Ann Quinn’s poems deftly navigate the “essential in between” moments:  the rich silences between words, a child’s slow shift into hard, adult truths, the ever-unknowable passage from life into death. At the same time, her work celebrates the sensuous world with joy and curiosity. Elegaic at core, the poems in Final Deploymentare also full of musings on art, precisely conjured memories, tender and fleeting moments with children, and above all, a love for the world in all its mystery and beauty.  – LIA PURPURA

“All else quiet, perhaps I might hear water rising in the trunks of the thousand trees,” ends the first poem of this yet-to-be-published collection. These poems are the voices of women whose words rise in this book, titled “A Sort of Song.” As Jane Kenyon said, “One of the functions of poetry is to keep the memory of people and places and things and happenings alive.” Using persona poems in the voice of my grandmother as a framework, I bring in the voices of other women—the artist’s models, the maids, the military wife. The poems explore specific types of work that women do, including the work of entering the world of sexual desire and the work of subtle influence toward good in the world. Letters, paintings, narratives and observation of the natural world all deepen this inquiry.

Poems from this collection have been published to date in 86 Logic, Broadkill Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Haibun Today, Loch Raven Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, and Yellow Arrow Journal.