This Gone Place

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