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, "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.'"

Amy Ratto Parks is the author of How to Remember the World (forthcoming, fall 2018), Song of Days, Torn and Mended, and Bread and Water Body, winner of the Merriam Frontier Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Interim, Mikrokosmos, The Mississippi Review, Court Green, and Barrow Street among others. Ratto Parks has worked as a reporter, a freelance writer and online writing course designer, and an editor of Writer's Digest, Fiction Writer, and Cutbank. She currently teaches at the University of Montana. To learn more, please visit her website: AmyRattoParks.com.