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. Praise for Soft Inheritance: “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.”—Richard Greene “Goodness, kindness, and love all leave scars in Fawn Parker’s stunning new collection. These scars slash the key to her empire of love and pain; of illness and strength; of sex and violence; of science and Nature and beauty’s bleeding, beating center. Soft Inheritance hits like a prizefighter; hard with its vast intelligence and deep tenderness, scarring and healing the divine terrible with the power of a benevolent demon.”—Lynn Crosbie
