Cure All - Kim Parko (Caketrain)

Kim Parko’s Cure All is the first-ever out-of-competition manuscript selected for publication at Caketrain. In this collection of linked vignettes, the preoccupations that have driven Parko’s years of written invention—crises of identity, parallelisms, anthropomorphism, transformative horror, epistles, flights of poesy, philosophical interrogations, psychic penetralia—crystallize to form her finest effort to date. Shot through with mysterious reflexivity and haunted harbingers, the pieces of Cure All at once stand ably alone and reflect the whole of the larger narrative arc—a feat accomplished through the distinctive quality of Parko’s imaginative lens. Says poet Amy Gerstler: “Animated by hyperacuity of consciousness, Cure All balances on that fulcrum between smoldering control and pregnant invention, scientific observation and an exacting madness.”

Kim Parko lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and dog. She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of the chapbook The Rest of the World Seems Unlikely (Achilles Chapbook Series, 2009). This is her first book.

About Caketrain
Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed are the editors of Caketrain Journal and Press, a literary imprint co-founded in 2003 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Caketrain's primary efforts consist of an annual journal which, in its seven issues to date, has featured the fiction, poetry and nonfiction of over 200 new and established talents; and a press series that includes chapbooks from Lizzie Skurnick, Tina May Hall, Tom Whalen, Matt Bell, Kim Parko and Claire Hero. Caketrain's other ongoing projects include the free, digital reissue of back-catalog titles and an annual chapbook competition. In May 2010, Caketrain's press arm will issue its two new poetry chapbooks: Ben Mirov's Ghost Machine and Lucas Farrell's Bird Any Damn Kind.

Kim Parko: Cure All
a collection of linked fictions, 2010
122 pages, paperback