Muscle Tree

"In Barbara Parchim's keenly observed poems, trees, birds, humans, and octopi are neighbors, friends, and confidantes. But far from anthropomorphizing, this is a book of conversations with the living: robins feasting on a too-brief crop of berries, a tree with a dangerous limb hanging over a street, a doctor-turned-potter finding new ways to view the body. Whether she's walking us through a pet cemetery quietly returning to the forest or the animals of Chernobyl inhabiting the ruins of human folly, Parchim moves us from celebration to elegy with a startling depth of knowledge-and a love for what we're losing and what we still have."



-Amy Miller, author of Astronauts and The Trouble with New England Girls