In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet's rapidly evolving reality where "kindness is a scar," though "not all scar-makers are kind." Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of "after"—post-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-death—these poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life.

Fawn Parker is a writer from Toronto currently based between Toronto and Montreal. She is the author of Looking Good and Having a Good Time (Metatron, 2015), Weak Spot (Anstruther, 2018), and Set-Point (ARP Books, 2019). Her story "Wunderhorse II" was the recipient of the Irving Layton Award for Fiction in 2017. A graduate of Concordia University's BA in English & Creative Writing, Fawn is a current MA candidate at the University of Toronto in the field of Creative Writing. She is co-founder of BAD NUDES Magazine and publisher at BAD Books.

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“In this hard-edged and harrowing debut collection of poems, Fawn Parker ponders a mother’s mastectomy, chemotherapy and death. She traces a hidden world of love and envy that grows under the soil of grief, and, in language reduced to its bones, articulates a hard-won vision of intimacy and consolation.”

Richard Greene, author of Dante’s House