Clouds, by Scott F. Parker

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Clouds, are their possibilities inexhaustible? Whether appearing as thought, body, practice, joke, or prayer, they refusal to settle. Moving between Zen, Romanticism, pop culture, weather, and everyday consciousness, the monostichs in Clouds treats clouds as mortal companions—aloof, intimate, and oddly instructive. Each poem is small enough to vanish on contact but welcoming enough to invite the reader to linger a moment before it does. Read together, these monostichs form a quiet theology of impermanence. The book does not argue or explain; it watches. In doing so, it offers a gentle practice of attention—one that suggests life itself may be less a solid ground than a passing formation, endlessly arriving, endlessly leaving, and always enough. Scott F. Parker is the author of A Way Home: Oregon Essays and Teaching without Teaching, among other books. His poems have appeared in Oakwood, Philosophy Now, Cold Moon Journal, Acorn, Hedgerow, and many other publications.