Cecily Parks navigates womanhood, motherhood, and place as the environment\u2014and a nation\u2014unravels during a time of pandemic and socio-political turmoil in The Seeds<\/em>. Deeply rooted in natural imagery, each poem threads the personal with the ecological. A harvest is not merely a harvest: it becomes a metaphor for what a mother can offer her daughters in terms of advice and guidance. Extinct fish, which suddenly find themselves alive again and swimming Texas waters, offer individuals some serious survival lessons, and the Rio Grande\u2019s ebbs, flows, and undulations are ominous in their predictions for humankind\u2019s future.<\/p>\n In other poems, the speaker dares to reveal the parts of themselves most individuals prefer to keep hidden. In one poem, the speaker reckons with the most violent and angry parts of themselves as the \u201cevening came at the end of a day \/ that I\u2019d consumed by saying brutal things to the people I love most.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> The delicate balance between self-awareness, self-acceptance, and the acceptance of one\u2019s ever-changing circumstances root these poems and give them an accessible universality. The speaker\u2019s keen sense of self, nonetheless, is also heartbreaking: They stand in juxtaposition to the rest of the human world, which seems unaware of what is happening in it.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Rio Grande,\u201d centered by an image-laden discussion of the ongoing immigration debate in the US, best embodies this concept. The poem\u2019s emotional power lies in its duality, as well as the speaker\u2019s personification of the river. The summer, observed by the Rio Grande, is one it \u201cwill \/ remember as \/ the summer the children \/ were taken \/ from fathers \/ and mothers.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> The poem eventually waxes into environmental commentary as the river succumbs to \u201cthe law of drought\u201d <\/em><\/strong>which \u201chas delivered \/ its trouble.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 Similarly, \u201cAmistad Gambustia,\u201d in its contemplation of a thought-to-be-extinct fish species, offers \u201cWhat did it feel like \/ to lose your only home \/ is a question you do not have to answer.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> Thus, place\u2014and ultimately displacement\u2014are subjects from which the collection\u2019s speaker does not shy away.<\/p>\n The Seeds<\/em> is a structurally experimental endeavor, too. Lengthy, thematically linked prose poems appear in between shorter, snapshot-like poems. This structure creates an artistic, even emotional, oscillation that parallels the speaker\u2019s encounters with their husband, their daughters, and the natural world. Parks\u2019 collection is definitely a collection appropriate for uncertain times, and its verses act as calm waves that remind its audience that hope exists despite the chaos\u2014if one simply looks to nature and embraces the messages and signs it has to offer.<\/p>\n The post The Seeds by Cecily Parks<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A rich, experimental, and deeply-layered evocative examination of place and motherhood during a time of national and global crisis Cecily Parks navigates womanhood, motherhood, and place as the environment\u2014and a nation\u2014unravels during a time of pandemic and socio-political turmoil in The Seeds. Deeply rooted in natural imagery, each poem threads the personal with the ecological. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5658"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}