Overview

Lisa Parker comes ""from women whose wombs rained babies...the first generation raised outside the hollers of the Blue Ridge...walking the line between the mountains and the cities."" As the speaker of the poem ""Tracing"" says, loading up her car to drive back to the city from her mountain homeplace, ""I have known that spastic moment of pushing away all my life...,"" pushing away and yet always, always looking back. For Parker writes from the razor edge of double consciousness which is both the gift and curse of the true poet-she is here and not here, there and not there, fully present in every moment yet already absent, too, isolating it, knowing it, naming it. She exults in ""every common, common thing,"" finding ""beauty in the scratched neon of those hometown fair rides, Kmart parking lot full of wide-eyed children sweat-palming tickets...those nights at the water tower...how the sky appeared a deep navy, banked against those black hills and jutting rockface, the distant glow of the coke furnace like a red marble perched on nothing."" This Gone Place is more than an extraordinary collection of poems; it is Lisa Parker's hard-earned, deeply felt autobiography.-Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and Fair and Tender Ladies

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9781956440638

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Reviews

"There is everything at stake-unabashed and utterly necessary-in Lisa Parker's brilliant first book. Memory and family and the blood of the land. Have you missed real poetry? Have you wondered where it's gone? Well, here it is. This is poetry in Lisa Parker's tending hands: stunningly new, yet familiar to the heart as scripture.-Honor�e Jeffers, author of Red Clay Suite and The Gospel of Barbecue What an amazing mind comes through in every poem in this collection, a rare and wonderful distinction among first books in this country which are leaning more and more toward the cerebral-with its deep and unrelenting irony and cynicism-and moving farther and farther from human experience with all its great complexities. If indeed this place of which Lisa Parker writes is now ""gone,"" it is brought back to us now, through her speaker, whole-cloth and shining with all the beauty and truth of that place, those people. Lisa Parker is an original voice, and her work in this book moves her reader back again into the deepest recesses of the human experience, pressing us deeply down into that thing we sometimes call a ""heart.""-Anne Caston, author of Flying Out with the Wounded and Judah's Lion"

"There is everything at stake-unabashed and utterly necessary-in Lisa Parker's brilliant first book. Memory and family and the blood of the land. Have you missed real poetry? Have you wondered where it's gone? Well, here it is. This is poetry in Lisa Parker's tending hands: stunningly new, yet familiar to the heart as scripture.-Honorée Jeffers, author of Red Clay Suite and The Gospel of Barbecue What an amazing mind comes through in every poem in this collection, a rare and wonderful distinction among first books in this country which are leaning more and more toward the cerebral-with its deep and unrelenting irony and cynicism-and moving farther and farther from human experience with all its great complexities. If indeed this place of which Lisa Parker writes is now ""gone,"" it is brought back to us now, through her speaker, whole-cloth and shining with all the beauty and truth of that place, those people. Lisa Parker is an original voice, and her work in this book moves her reader back again into the deepest recesses of the human experience, pressing us deeply down into that thing we sometimes call a ""heart.""-Anne Caston, author of Flying Out with the Wounded and Judah's Lion"

There is everything at stake-unabashed and utterly necessary-in Lisa Parker's brilliant first book. Memory and family and the blood of the land. Have you missed real poetry? Have you wondered where it's gone? Well, here it is. This is poetry in Lisa Parker's tending hands: stunningly new, yet familiar to the heart as scripture.-Honoree Jeffers, author of Red Clay Suite and The Gospel of Barbecue What an amazing mind comes through in every poem in this collection, a rare and wonderful distinction among first books in this country which are leaning more and more toward the cerebral-with its deep and unrelenting irony and cynicism-and moving farther and farther from human experience with all its great complexities. If indeed this place of which Lisa Parker writes is now gone, it is brought back to us now, through her speaker, whole-cloth and shining with all the beauty and truth of that place, those people. Lisa Parker is an original voice, and her work in this book moves her reader back again into the deepest recesses of the human experience, pressing us deeply down into that thing we sometimes call a heart. -Anne Caston, author of Flying Out with the Wounded and Judah's Lion

Author Information

Lisa Parker is a native Virginian, a poet, musician, and photographer. This is a reprint of her first book, This Gone Place, which won the 2010 ASA Weatherford Award. She has worked in the Department of Defense for nearly twenty years, worked as a first responder for 15 years, and currently serves as a crisis and disaster response volunteer with Team Rubicon. Some of her work may be found at www.wheatpark.com.

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