ARTICULATIONS: POEMS by Jerahmy Parsons of Sonoma County, California. ISBN 978-1-939301-60-4, $12.00 (postage paid, domestic; email for international postage rates). 28-page staple-bound chapbook. PayPal Order (1 copy); for multiple copies and discount, email MammothPubs [at] Gmail for information.

JERAHMY PARSONS was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts to parents of Greek, Lebanese, and Portuguese ancestry. A farmer, lifeguard, and AmeriCorps member with a degree in chemistry, he now spends his days as a winemaker in northern California. In 2013, his poetry appeared in Gwangju News, an international magazine. Articulations is his first published collection.

These impressive, engaging poems of witness and observation offer concise, meditative lines that portray the world and its challenges a moment at a time, something like a light flickering off and on in a darkened theater. Only what needs to be said is said, not due to a loss of words but due to careful mining of imperative “voices measuring beyond the grain.” From a field with its “yellow body writing/the wind like cursive” to circles of “lavender/spilling purple oceans” to wildfires where open space becomes “Remnants of the wild/it once was” and on to the body “like a line/connected/to a thousand voices,” the poems in Articulations have no need to beg us to return to them. We arrive over and over in wonderment to the recognizable and new. We become stars returning to stars, echoes of every sight and every sound. “Which one of us/Will be worshipped/And who will wear the scars?”                                                                     ~Katherine Hastings, host of NPR’s Word Temple

In Jerahmy Parsons’ stunning debut of poems, the broken and shattered cadences of memory reappear in the interstices of the immanently (and immaculately) articulable. This is a work that cleaves to the heart of the spoken and the oracular, finding concealed transmissions in the spaces that produce the mind’s monuments and which the mind in turn peoples with the “lightwork” of fragrances and the minor raptures of the momentary. What does the natural world ask of us in a time of liminal fires and “broken forest[s]”? “If we could heal water/the way it heals us.” Here we witness small suns of thought shift uncannily into the lunar silence and shadowplay of our tangled cathexis to the world in the “arrangement’s/unheard pieces.” Parsons writes, “A few breaths cling/to resistance. Maybe these/stories are places to come back to./Voices measuring beyond the grain.” These indeed are stories that recall us to the grain of the voice, the wellspring of tremendous whisperings, and lyric invocations that remind us of our place in the world.            ~Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Author of Place-Discipline