Finlay's poems are the works of a person who has traveled the world in search of himself and his place in it. He is a Midwestern poet in the sense that his poems hide narratives that seek honesty above all else, and he is not a Midwestern poet in the sense that he doesn't apologize for the truth when it is found. Mammoths draws from his experiences and from a wide survey of human history to make us look at someone who isn't quite at home yet, exploring themes of place, memory and history. His collection often rejects the division between personal history and objective world history, instead opting for a hyper-local reinterpretation of the stories we tell about the world.