That Word

“Jamie Parsley’s new poems tread the path of grief within the liturgical map of holy days, feasts, and spiritual acts. These poems offer a voice ‘forever altered’ by loss, a keening we sense in each moment depicted until we understand ‘We are what we hold / and let go.’ Through a careful, even subdued study of a year beyond the death of a loved one, we begin to understand ‘perfect mourning’ that is both curse and grace as Parsley’s fine poem ‘These Men’ shows us.” ~Heid Erdrich, author of Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems