Kim Ports Parsons now lives near Shenandoah National Park and focuses on the reading, writing, and sharing of poetry. As she gardens, walks, or stirs a pot of sauce, she is listening for new poems. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and appears in many print and online publications, such as Poetry Ireland Review and Vox Populi. Her debut collection, The Mayapple Forest, was published by Terrapin Books in 2022. Kim volunteers weekly for Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry.

Books by Kim Ports Parsons:

Other poems on the web by Kim Ports Parsons:
Three poems
"I Can't Write a Poem with a Gun"
"Life Goals"
Three poems
"All In"
"A Winter Fairytale"

Kim Ports Parsons's Website.

About The Mayapple Forest:

"'Shelve your losses. Taste spoonfuls in remembrance,' exhorts Kim Ports Parsons in this moving and lyrical first collection, The Mayapple Forest. A profound generosity of spirit guides these poems, as the poet navigates a landscape of both loss and abundance. The old homestead, the mother's presence, the lost child and lost self are set against an enduring natural plenty: of gardens, the gathering of food, and the sweetness of cooking with family. Sometimes shadows are raised, sometimes pain suggested—the mayapple's dangerous, delicious lure—but always, the work transcends to a deepening mindfulness, and an authentic acceptance of the world as it actually is. May we all learn from these beautifully compassionate and discerning poems. "
—Janet MacFadyen

"Kim Ports Parsons' stunning debut collection, The Mayapple Forest, bursts forth with such lush language and captivating images that I read it twice the first night I received it. Parsons captures a reader's experience in her poem Ella: Two Ways, which might also serve as an ars poetica. She writes: "When Ella sings, she spreads her song like a quilt of velvet chords / wrapped around lonely, a dreamwork of sighs, / a belly full of ache, an earthquake in the heart." Parsons opens her whole self to the world around her and within her to pray, so her choice of epigraph from Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem" is perfect. Brava!"
—Malaika King Albrecht

"From the very beginning of The Mayapple Forest Kim Ports Parsons awakens a reader's hope despite undeniable cause for despair, 'The gifts of these months of plague and separation / are silence and space and time . . ./to be alive, to breathe, to wake, to hear the owl's call.' Poems of loss-the absence of her mother-precede poems of thrill and excitement for being with her lover, 'I want to ride through this life like a child standing on the hump of an old sedan.' Parsons writes with tenderness, resilience, fortitude, and a trust reminiscent of Jack Gilbert's."
—Angela Dribben