Overview

"""Shelve your losses. Taste spoonfuls in remembrance,"" exhorts Kim Ports Parsons in this moving and lyrical first collection, The Mayapple Forest. A profound generosity of spirit guides these poems, as the poet navigates a landscape of both loss and abundance. The old homestead, the mother's presence, the lost child and lost self are set against an enduring natural plenty: of gardens, the gathering of food, and the sweetness of cooking with family. Sometimes shadows are raised, sometimes pain suggested-the mayapple's dangerous, delicious lure-but always, the work transcends to a deepening mindfulness, and an authentic acceptance of the world as it actually is. May we all learn from these beautifully compassionate and discerning poems. -Janet MacFadyen"

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9781947896598

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Reviews

Kim Ports Parsons' stunning debut collection, The Mayapple Forest, bursts forth with such lush language and captivating images that I read it twice the first night I received it. Parsons captures a reader's experience in her poem Ella: Two Ways, which might also serve as an ars poetica. She writes: When Ella sings, she spreads her song like a quilt of velvet chords / wrapped around lonely, a dreamwork of sighs, / a belly full of ache, an earthquake in the heart. Parsons opens her whole self to the world around her and within her to pray, so her choice of epigraph from Joy Harjo's Eagle Poem is perfect. Brava! -Malaika King Albrecht From the very beginning of The Mayapple Forest Kim Ports Parsons awakens a reader's hope despite undeniable cause for despair, The gifts of these months of plague and separation / are silence and space and time . . ./to be alive, to breathe, to wake, to hear the owl's call. Poems of loss-the absence of her mother-precede poems of thrill and excitement for being with her lover, I want to ride through this life like a child standing on the hump of an old sedan. Parsons writes with tenderness, resilience, fortitude, and a trust reminiscent of Jack Gilbert's. -Angela Dribben

Author Information

Kim Ports Parsons grew up in the countryside near Baltimore and earned degrees from Goucher College, University of Maryland, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She taught students of all ages for decades, and worked in public and school libraries. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies. Kim volunteers weekly for Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry, an international, intersectional, intergenerational poetry community. She lives next to Shenandoah National Park, gardens, walks, and writes. The Mayapple Forest is her debut collection.

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