This Lovely Body by Mary Elizabeth Parker

“Surreal and startling, Parker’s poems aren’t for those seeking comfort … Parker has peeled away assumptions and pretensions to create portraits of metaphoric beauty…-

-Barbara Lingerfelt

…a foreign land…intimately connected with the body, and with physical and sensual feelings [where] the only salvation lies in the body, or in deep instincts often connected with the physical…

–Kathleen Hayes

[Mary Elizabeth Parker’s] poems are fresh, vivid and intoxicating..

–Leah Maines

Rating: **** [4 of 5 Stars!]

“Mary Elizabeth Parker’s poems in This Lovely Body shimmer with a love for the details of this earth, [using] images from nature to explore the depths and challenges of grief. Allowing grief to lead her, Parker follows that path into the hollowing-out of all the dark and light places such a journey can take. But in the end, the loss is so monumental, there is little comfort to be found, even in the beauty of the natural world. A mother is dying, leaving behind a bereft family. That anguish echoes in these lines: ‘She would fold her girls back into her body if it were not such an unsafe place.’ Words cannot make sense of such loss, but somehow, Parker’s poems bring the reader to a place of acceptance, perhaps even peace as she writes in the final poem the mother ‘enters now into another country.’ A remarkable collection.”

–Anne Clinard Barnhill, author of COAL BABY, WHAT YOU LONG FOR, and AT HOME IN THE LAND OF OZ.

Rating: **** [4 of 5 Stars!]