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. (From Palimpsest Press)

Fawn Parker is an author and currently a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. Her novel What We Both Know was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2022. Soft Inheritance is her first poetry collection.