Songs Sharp and Tender
A new book of poetry from Carol Park
Upcoming Events
Monday 10/14 (Columbus Day / Indigenous People’s Day) 8:30 - 10:30 AM Rainbow Room of the Sequoia YMCA (RWC), membership not required; drop-in format. Coffee and snacks
Monday 10/14 3:30-5PM private room at the Cup and Saucer restaurant in San Jose
Monday 10/21 7PM Redwood City Main library meeting room, upstairs, ; two poets read with focus on intercultural relationships, Q&A.
Sunday 11/17 3:00PM backyard party at the Liggetts’ in Atherton - socializing, heavy appetizers, and light reading - Contact me for details.
Future events/readings will be added here as they are scheduled.
Carol Park teaches ESL, volunteers in a jail, hikes, gardens, cooks, and reads. Pursuing various geographies—cultural, physical, and spiritual—delights her. Her poetry appears in SLANT, Minerva Rising, The Haight Ashbury Journal, Black Fox Literary, MiGoZine, Monterey Poetry Review, The Broadkill Review, California Quarterly, New Contexts 2, 3, and 4, and Ginosko Literary, among others. Her MFA comes from Seattle Pacific University. In fall of 2024, Kelsay Press released her poetry book, Songs Sharp and Tender, touching on travel and the choppy waves of family life while adapting to an inter-cultural relationships.
“Carol Park’s gorgeous and poignant debut collection, Songs Sharp and Tender, is a love letter to the self in relationship with others and the earth, even as it holds space for the grief and loss that always attends deep love. The poems interrogate fraught identities, personal and political, mapping out a path to wholeness and redemption. The speaker reflects and wonder, “Fog hides our aches and doubts/churning deep—how to make/of midlife days some lasting art?” Through poems of dazzling images and luminous metaphors, Park reflects on the vulnerability of loved ones in illness and the joys and burdens of bearing a self into the world. Through it all comes an affirmation of forgiveness and reconciliation sustaining us as readers in a bewildering and beautiful world.”
—Heathen Durr
“Songs Sharp and Tender” was released in September 2024
