Cure All, by Kim Parko. Feb 2010
5 3/8" × 8 5/16" × 122 pp.
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“These surreal pieces are quietly intense and fervently alive. They offer visions both meditative and alarming. Animated by hyperacuity of consciousness, Cure All balances on that fulcrum between smoldering control and pregnant invention, scientific observation and an exacting madness. The literal and the figurative, fact and fancy, degeneration and rebirth all chase each other, mate and merge. The mind, the body and the seething natural world engulf one another. Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘Imagination…is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshots of reality.’ That elixir is the rich, rushing lifeblood of this collection.”
Amy Gerstler, author of Ghost Girl
“Uncanny and perverse, the poetic fictions of Kim Parko’s Cure All act as electrodes to stimulate unsuspected and possibly long-unused yet sublimely meaningful circuitry in the brain.”
Daniel Grandbois, author of Unlucky Lucky Days
“Parko’s Cure All is a wonderful combination of striking images, clever word play, and personal heartbreak—all simmering together and shining in a book that is sure to make many ‘best-of-the-year’ lists.”
Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes
“To call these pieces unique isn’t enough. With her fractured shards of advice, sweet little nightmares, tunneled eyes and sprouted scales, Kim Parko presents a twisting puzzle of fire blights and lonely spines. This book will crawl into your house.”
Amelia Gray, author of AM/PM
Kim Parko’s Cure All is the first-ever out-of-competition manuscript selected for publication at Caketrain. In this collection of linked vignettes, the preoccupations that have driven Parko’s years of written invention—crises of identity, parallelisms, anthropomorphism, transformative horror, epistles, flights of poesy, philosophical interrogations, psychic penetralia—all crystallize to form her finest effort to date. Shot through with mysterious reflexivities and haunted harbingers, the pieces of Cure All at once stand ably alone and reflect the whole of the larger narrative arc—a feat accomplished through the distinctive quality of Parko’s imaginative lens.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the publications in which these pieces first appeared, some in different form and under different titles: 3rd Bed: “Explain,” “1.5”; 5AM: “Learn”; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet: “Schoolgirl”; Frigg: “Sunday Best,” “The Curtain,” “The Conversationalists,” “Lucy,” “Calm Eye,” “The Spinning Woman,” “Gash,” “Matinee,” “Hibernation”; Keyhole: “Root Mouth”; Jubilat: “Murderess,” “Hold,” “Commerce”; Ocho: “The Bomb,” “Stork,” “Phases of the Moon”; The Bitter Oleander: “After the Flood.” Text Copyright 2009 Kim Parko. Cover photograph Copyright 2007 Elene Usdin. Used by permission.