“Lemon Bars of Parnassus” from Parallel Press

December 11, 2013
Lemon Bars of Parnassus
Lemon Bars of Parnassus by Lee Kisling

Parallel Press, an imprint of the UW–Madison Libraries, is pleased to announce the publication of Lemon Bars of Parnassus, a new collection of poetry by Lee Kisling ($10.00, Parallel Press, 2013).

With an eye trained on the curious, often quixotic details of a world in which “the only gods left are bandaged and wear glasses / because the old gods are all locked behind / the Lemon Bars of Parnassus” Lee Kisling shows us lives lived after the bad choices, the accidents and catastrophes. Sorrow and comedy make comfortable companions in poems that wonder where picnic rain comes from and how the moon can “make magnets of hands and lips / when the world / is so full of care?” This is not a world of conventional beauty, but one where stars “sparkle with irony” and the telltale signs of a town’s ordinary human tragedies are witnessed by owls.  Taken as a whole, this collection invokes a certain disquiet but also the unmistakable majesty of the human journey.

Lee Kisling, an Iowa native, is an engineer, writer, husband, and father of two who has lived in Hudson, Wisconsin for twenty-five years. In 1992, his first juvenile fiction novel, The Fools’ War, was published by Harper Collins. He has written many songs and poems, plays the piano, and in 2008 had a series of cartoons published in the Wisconsin poetry journal, Free Verse. The poems in this collection are from 2006–2010. He is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing Department at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Lemon Bars of Parnassus is available for purchase through Parallel Press for $10.00. Discounts are provided for libraries, booksellers, and non-profit organizations.

Questions? Contact Parallel Press: 608-262-1433 or parallelpress@library.wisc.edu.