In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet's rapidly evolving reality where kindness is a scar, though not all scar-makers are kind. ," Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of "afterpost-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-deaththese poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life.
Fawn Parker is a Giller-nominated author of five books including the forthcoming Hi, it's me (McClelland & Stewart 2024). Her story Feed Machine was nominated for the 2020 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and her story Wunderhorse II was anthologized in André Forgets After Realism, (Véhicule, 2022). Fawn is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick and her work is represented by Ron Eckel at CookeMcDermid Agency.