About the Author

MARY ELIZABETH PARKER's poetry collections include THE SEX GIRL, Urthona Press, and 4 chapbooks: MISS HAVISHAM IN WINTER, FutureCycle Press; CAVE-GIRL, Finishing Line Press; BREATHING IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY, Paradise Press; and THAT STUMBLING RITUAL, Coraddi Publications, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in NOTRE DAME REVIEW, GETTYSBURG REVIEW, NEW LETTERS, ARTS & LETTERS, CONFRONTATION, MARGIE, PASSAGES NORTH, and GREENSBORO REVIEW (nominated for a Pushcart Prize). She has been featured poet on POETRY DAILY and in MARGIN: EXPLORING MODERN MAGICAL REALISM, and has twice been a fellow at Vermont Studio Center. She also writes prose: Her essay "Combat Boots" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her short story "Papier-Mache" was published as part of Papier-Mache Press's anthology Grow Old Along with Me; The Best Is Yet to Be, whose audio version was one of only 5 books-on-tape nominated for a national Grammy Award that year (Hillary Clinton's book-on-tape It Takes A Village won). She is creator and chair of the Dana Awards in the Novel, Short Fiction, and Poetry.

Reviews

"Mary Elizabeth Parker's poems in This Lovely Body shimmer with a love for the details of this earth, [using] images from nature to explore the depths and challenges of grief. Parker follows the path of grief into the hollowing-out such a journey can take. A mother is dying. That anguish echoes in these lines: 'She would fold her girls back into her body if it were not such an unsafe place.' Words cannot make sense of such loss, but somehow, Parker's poems bring the reader to a place of acceptance, perhaps even peace as she writes in the final poem that the mother 'enters now into another country.' A remarkable collection." Anne Clinard Barnhill, author of COAL, BABY; WHAT YOU LONG FOR; and AT HOME IN THE LAND OF OZ