Linda Parsons is a poet, playwright, and editor. She is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and has contributed to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Shenandoah, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among many other journals and anthologies. Her fourth poetry collection is This Shaky Earth. As playwright-in-residence, she develops plays with The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Books by Linda Parsons:

Other poems on the web by Linda Parsons:
Two poems
Three poems
"Divine Rods"
"Old Words"
Two poems
"Elegant Decay"
"My Father Asks If We're Dead"
Two poems
"Home Fire"
"Snapshot"
"On Fire"

About Candescent:

"The light of home, of memory. Of kin, those who are passing through the vale—'like my father on the hillock of his final pass'—and those who hold 'the future white hot in your hands.' The blue-black light of endings. The morning light rekindled. Linda Parsons' Candescent is a shimmering gift to us, her readers, our lives illuminated by her words, precise and true: 'embers in the gloaming spit like tickseed / from grasses.'"
—Pauletta Hansel

"Linda Parsons honors grief. She shares with us her knowing that as the threads of our lives unravel, so too, gifts materialize in ways we never dreamed. Here, trauma is transformed into a journey of enlightenment. We come to understand that what first appears as a door marked 'Loss,' the author walks through victorious, fully revitalized, with a flare of capriciousness. She finds a new depth of being, and joy in every breath taken."
—Stellasue Lee

"In Linda Parsons' new collection, Candescent, idols fall, marriages fail, and bodies falter, yet the mind still seeks, the heart still sings, and the spirit still centers. Her poems explore what it means and why it matters that love '[c]overs the ground we live and perish on.' Sometimes we seem surrounded by only grief and lamentation, forsaken by the years, but Parsons reminds us that we are never not on a Damascus road—'wayward,' yes, but always in the presence of 'wayfinders' leading us toward transformation. While we may be only passing through, up ahead and drawing near is Bethlehem, blessing, delight, peace, joy, 'the aching / bliss of it all.'"
—Jeff Hardin