Field Folly Snow

What an intriguing book. Parks isn’t trying to close the coffin lid on language. This is fresh work with a surpassingly delicate sense of language. This is a totally admirable volume.

The pure joy and almost childlike playfulness of speech-making is evident in every poem. On the other hand, the mind in these poems wrestles relentlessly with sense, trying to find sense, trying to uncover meaning through various uses of intense perception, finely crafted description, and lyric resolution. . . . The poems in this collection transfigure the world, allowing the reader to experience landscapes haunted by a passionate interiority.

* from the introduction to Cold Work *

The sharp, pastoral imagery of Parks's debut is set ablaze by an ominous tone and the author's fine musical ear. Her tight tercets and prose blocks convey a sense of isolation, which, when broken by the appearance of someone other than the speaker, is as jarring as a rock heaved into a still pond.

This poetry collection demands close reading and deep engagement to follow its levels of found material and its internal discoveries, and these poems are worth the effort.