Radial Bloom

Our 2018 Mosaic Novel, this book contains a series of prose poems that spins the tale of a woman haunted by the unloosening tendrils of need and the man she braids from them. Khaty Xiong, author of Poor Anima, says: "In this verse novel, we follow the bewitching journey of a woman whose life becomes entangled with a visiting ghost. Befriended, loved, and borrowed for his wounds, we traverse, prayer by prayer, along 'the ridgelines, the movement of the stars.' Amy Ratto Parks bestows unto us a body of 'thin air, ' which is, 'any air we fall through, ' where hellish muses, gifts, and otherworldly forces may come before us, troubled and far from sin. In a world teeming with familiar devastations, charted and uncharted, Radial Bloom is a body of dreams, 'blowing smoke into the cold night, blowing...like rescue...like love...[like] the long bell of evening.' As we descend below waters, we are astonished that somewhere in a field of honeysuckle lives a song moored in our hearts -- a song of wrought paradise, 'throwing knives, throwing knives into trees.'"