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The Seeds
The Seeds confronts the ecological paradox of homemaking in an environment domesticity rejects—one of mess, disease, and everyday violence—to explore the equal distress and delight entangled in caring for a family, a new home, and the earth that sustains them.
Cecily Parks draws on literary sources ranging from nursery rhymes to The Odyssey to examine how we form relationships with the natural world. The lessons of these poems are in processes that underscore humanity's power to alter nature and powerlessness to control an epiphyte's fall from a live oak, an urban creek's response to drought, or a roof rat's nest-building in the attic of the poet's home. Motherhood positions the speaker to revisit her girlhood relation to the earth, and as her two young daughters exemplify the ease with which children can become nature's intimates, the speaker must confront the ecological disturbances that arise from her own attempts to prevent upset to the garden through aggression by weeds, animals, and weather.
The Seeds deconstructs what it means to love nature, especially when the natural world challenges our desires for beauty, abundance, and safety. Looking to more-than-human guides with an open mind and heart, Parks' third book is a collection of unconventional contemporary environmental histories, in which places become biological and emotional primers for those who will inherit them.
Cecily Parks draws on literary sources ranging from nursery rhymes to The Odyssey to examine how we form relationships with the natural world. The lessons of these poems are in processes that underscore humanity's power to alter nature and powerlessness to control an epiphyte's fall from a live oak, an urban creek's response to drought, or a roof rat's nest-building in the attic of the poet's home. Motherhood positions the speaker to revisit her girlhood relation to the earth, and as her two young daughters exemplify the ease with which children can become nature's intimates, the speaker must confront the ecological disturbances that arise from her own attempts to prevent upset to the garden through aggression by weeds, animals, and weather.
The Seeds deconstructs what it means to love nature, especially when the natural world challenges our desires for beauty, abundance, and safety. Looking to more-than-human guides with an open mind and heart, Parks' third book is a collection of unconventional contemporary environmental histories, in which places become biological and emotional primers for those who will inherit them.
- GenresPoetryShort Stories
100 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 17, 2025
I finished reading The Seeds with a sick baby sleeping peacefully on my chest finally far enough into postpartum to look back and reflect on the fields, alleyways, lakes, sidewalk weeds, and trees I've passed through to find myself back "here," which is weirdly also where this book of poems is? I was happy to feel very deeply: "Motherhood as water or bed, motherhood as the event or the shape it left?" The story of the disappearing Gabusia, a ring of petals "because I touched the yellow flower / I suspected of being dead," "Should I have known love / would make me vicious toward the people / I loved." Reading this was the experience of being able to look back on life at the same time you are living it.
April 21, 2025
This was an enjoyable read with really great specificity and sensory work. I thought the weaving of motherhood with neighborhood landscapes and also with myth was compelling!
December 26, 2025
Such an earthbound felt collection. Love "the rhyme" poems so, so much.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews