by Deb Scott

A Walk Through the Memory Palace by Pamela Johnson Parker

“As you walk through a memory palace, each room holds a category of recollections assigned to the various objects lodged within.”

Welcome to the February Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour. If you are new to this series, take a look at this post for more information.

About A Walk Through Memory Palace
Pamela Johnson Parker is a medical editor and adjunct professor in creative writing and poetry. Her debut collection, A Walk Through the Memory Palace, was the winner of Qarrtsiluni’s 2009 poetry chapbook contest. Her poems, flash fiction and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in The Binnacle, The Other Journal, New Madrid, Pebble Lake Review, Holly Rose Review, Six Sentences, MiPOesias, Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal and Anti-. She is also the featured poet in the April 2009 Broadsided series of poetry and art. A graduate of the master of fine arts program at Murray State University, Parker lives in western Kentucky and blogs at Pamela’s Musings.

We are pleased to feature A Walk Through Memory Palace in February’s Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour. Follow the tour throughout the month with your own copy of the collection. The work is available in print, digital and podcast formats.

Dinty Moore, the chapbook contest judge, had this to say about the manuscript:

The language is textured, clear, and sometimes disquieting, the images both sensory and sensual, and each line crafted with painstaking care. Whether writing about rich gardens, sagging breasts, or the ink of a tattoo, this poet sees through the obvious to something radiant on the other side, painting a startling portrait of an intimate world. Not a wasted word here: the nouns are like gemstones.

Read Write Poem member Elizabeth Switaj had this to say about Parker’s collection, in her review of the chapbook:

As you walk through a memory palace, each room holds a category of recollections assigned to the various objects lodged within. Pick up a vase, and you remember the meaning of stamen. Pick up a jar, and you remember the smell of a rose. The marbles in the jar hold each time you’ve smelled one. A memory palace is not a physical place but, rather, an elaborate mnemonic device in which imagined concrete objects help you to organize and recall that which you do not wish to forget.

Finally, Read Write Poem community director Nathan Moore recently interviewed Parker for our Member Spotlight series. You can read about her process and habits and other things, such as her opinion on the likelihood that poetry can save the world.

Tour stops for A Walk Through Memory Palace
Jan. 28 :: James Brush :: Coyote Mercury
Feb. 2 :: Daniel Romo :: Peyote Soliloquies
Feb. 6 :: Jill Crammond Wickham :: Jillypoet
Feb. 9 :: Lawrence Gladeview :: Righteous Rightings
Feb. 11 :: Sarah J. Sloat :: The Rain in My Purse
Feb. 16 :: Nathan Landau :: Poems About Nothing in Particular
Feb. 18 :: Dave Jarecki :: Dave Jarecki
Feb. 20 :: David Moolten :: Edible Detritus

Get involved!
Would you like to get involved in the tour as a reviewer? Just join the Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour group, and then add your name to the forum thread titled “Sign up to be a Virtual Book Tour reviewer.”

Want to get your book on the tour? We’ve already set up partnerships with a number of presses, and we’re booked out several months. We also do the tour only once a month, which means we’re extremely limited in terms of what we can include. With that in mind, feel free to have your publisher send a query to virtualbooktour (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.

Next month, the Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour will feature Maged Zaher’s book, Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer, recently released by Pressed Wafer.

Deb Scott is a community director for Read Write Poem. She also co-manages the Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour. In past lives she used to borrow her friends clothes all the time. She doesn’t do that anymore, but she does steal her husband’s desserts on occasion. Deb blogs at Stoney Moss.