Soft Inheritance

In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet's rapidly evolving reality where "kindness is a scar," though "not all scar-makers are kind." Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of "after"-post-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-death-these poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life. In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet's rapidly evolving reality where "kindness is a scar," though "not all scar-makers are kind." Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of "after"-post-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-death-these poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life. In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet's rapidly evolving reality where "kindness is a scar," though "not all scar-makers are kind." Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of "after"-post-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-death-these poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life. "In this hard-edged and harrowing debut collection of poems, Fawn Parker ponders a mother's mastectomy, chemotherapy and death. She traces a hidden world of love and envy that grows under the soil of grief, and, in language reduced to its bones, articulates a hard-won vision of intimacy and consolation."