Poems by by Anne Leigh Parrish | Unsolicited Press Mar. 2026
This new collection of poems strikes deep into the heart of grieving and offers an elevated discourse on loneliness and loss. But there is also joy and delight in a world brimming with beauty. Art, nature, and anything which lifts the spirit challenge sorrow and despair. Those who have wronged us stand alongside those we have wounded, not asking for forgiveness, only to be remembered, to be heard. These seventy-eight poems joined by twenty gorgeous illustrations by Kathryn Gerhardt, brings the reader on a marvelous journey that balances observation with experience, passion with the cool rendering of fact.
Offering no absolution, the book portrays human emotions as dualistic: joy braided with sorrow, and clarity shadowed by doubt. A stark, deliberate confrontation with the truths people choose to remember and the ones people struggle to name, the poems collected in The Banished and the Dead highlight time’s indifference as an essential force in shaping human understandings of identity and legacy. – Foreword Reviews 5/5 stars