“Jamie Parsley’s new poems tread the path of grief within the liturgical map of holy days, feasts, and spiritual acts. These poems offer a voice ‘forever altered’ by loss, a keening we sense in each moment depicted until we understand ‘We are what we hold / and let go.’ Through a careful, even subdued study of a year beyond the death of a loved one, we begin to understand ‘perfect mourning’ that is both curse and grace as Parsley’s fine poem ‘These Men’ shows us.” ~Heid Erdrich, author of Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems

That Word

Literature & Fiction

Jamie Parsley

Poetry

North Star Press of St. Cloud

In the early evening of Thursday, June 20, 1957, a tornado struck the city of Fargo, ND. When it was done, ten people lay dead (three more would later die from their injuries), a city was devastated and countless lives would never be the same again. In this evocative and moving elegy of the storm and it's victims, Parlsey, and Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota, weaves a heartbreaking story of loss, poverty, pain, faith, and ultimately, renewal, and gives voice to those victims who, before now, were unable to speak for themselves. This is the story of the resilience and fortitude of the people who survived the storm and those who did not.

Fargo, 1957

North Dakota State University Press

The scope of the poets in this collection is as broad as the landscape itself, including work by Heid E. Erdrich, Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, Ed Bok Lee, Tim Murphy, and North Dakota's Poet Laureate, Larry Woiwode.
Some are poets descended from indigenous inhabitants of the High Plains. Others are descendants of thos who immigrated here from Germany, Russia, or the Scandinavian countries in the nineteenth century, or more recently from other parts of the country and world. They write about the historical struggles of settlement and assimilation, and more contemporary versions of those struggles in the Bakken oil patch in the western part of the state. Some write about North Dakota from the rural settings they have known and loved for a lifetime, others from the distant vantages of nostalgia or escape, and still others from the point of view of transplants coming to terms with their new home. The poets here include seasoned and emerging voices, women and men, old and young, those from the ranching and oil-flared badlands west of the Missouri, and from the flood-prone river valley farmlands of the east.
The poems in this book ache for home. They ache to be at home. In reflecting those who ache in this great expanse, these poems are about what connects us together as humans, poems that sing to each other across lines and pages and space, demonstrating that, as poet Thomas McGrath asserts in his Letter to an Imaginary Friend, North Dakota is everywhere.

North Dakota is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets

Rhoda Janzen

Aaron Poochigian

Tim Murphy

Robert King

Madelyne Camrud

Debra Marquart

Mark Vinz

Richard, Watson

Ed Bok Lee

Larry Woiwode

Heidi Czerwiec

Heid E. Erdrich

Dale Jacobson

Denise Lajimodiere

Lisa Linrud-Marcis

David R. Solheim

Collection of Poems by Jamie Parsley, written during during his battle with cancer.

Just Once: Poems

Loonfeather Press

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Books by Jamie Parsley