The Petals of Your Eyes

by Aimee Parkison

Overview

The debut novel by an award-winning author of short stories.

Kidnapped girls trapped in a remote theater surrounded by mountains and jungle are forced into illegal performances, displayed in cabinets with curiosities, delicate limbs bound by straps, accompanied by dancing puppets fashioned of dead children's bones. The Petals of Your Eyes conjures up a painful, poetic world that won't soon be forgotten.

Aimee Parksion is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Parkison has received a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review. Her first collection, Woman with Dark Horses, won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, judged by Cris Mazza. Parkison has an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938603204
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	05/13/2014
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Aimee Parkison is a fiction writer and poet living in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, Parkison is currently researching a historical novel involving wounded Civil War veterans, spiritualism, parlor games, and courtship in Victorian America. Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Parkison has received a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review. Parkison has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her first book, Woman with Dark Horses, won the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize and was published by Starcherone in 2004. Her second story collection, The Innocent Party, was published by BOA Editions’ American Reader Series (2012). Parkison’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won several awards given by literary magazines, including a prize from Fiction International for emerging writers on the subject of madness, the Jack Dyer Fiction Prize from Crab Orchard Review, and a prize from The Literary Review. Her stories and poems have appeared in the anthologies Men Undressed: Female Writers and the Male Sexual Experience, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, and Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Experimental Prose by Women Writers. In addition, Parkison’s writing has been published by numerous literary magazines, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, So to Speak, Nimrod, Unstuck, The Literary Review, Feminist Studies, Mississippi Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Santa Monica Review, Other Voices, Crab Orchard Review, Fiction International, Seattle Review, Lake Effect, and Denver Quarterly. More information about Aimee Parkison’s work can be found at www.aimeeparkison.com.

What People are Saying About This

The Griffin

The Petals of Your Eyesis a story of innocence and the repercussions of maintaining such a quality. It is a story of flowers wilting, of young girls hiding behind a mask of petals, behind their fears and naivety to please watching masters, acting out a show contained in glass. Parkison poetically and fiercely advocates for the plight of young women kidnapped and forced to grow up before their proper adulthood.

The Brooklyn Rail - Joyelle McSweeney

A fairy tale so harrowing it reads like a screen memory—so harrowing it must be true.

Entropy - Brooke Wonders

Experimental fiction worth seeking out and reading closely

Michael Martone

In the rippling ripeness of The Petals of Your Eyes, Aimee Parkison collects the high-gloss tropic tropes of richly ruined Romanticism. The effect is beyond the wild blue yonder, sublimely sublime, as if Mr. Poe himself had made it and was streaming back the searing steam-punked celestial.

Shelf Awareness

A darkly beautiful, surreal novel about children trapped in an obscure sex trade.

Editorial Reviews

"Highly recommended for readers on the edge."
- Library Journal

"A fairy tale so harrowing it reads like a screen memory — so harrowing it must be true."
- Joyelle McSweeney, The Brooklyn Rail

"A darkly beautiful, surreal novel about children trapped in an obscure sex trade."
- Shelf Awareness

"In the rippling ripeness of The Petals of Your Eyes, Aimee Parkison collects the high-gloss tropic tropes of richly ruined Romanticism. The effect is beyond the wild blue yonder, sublimely sublime, as if Mr. Poe himself had made it and was streaming back the searing steam-punked celestial."
- Michael Martone

"Parkison won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2004, and one can see why. Her new novel opens, “Captured girls in cabinets with curiosities. One is my sister, and the other my lover.” The concept is boldly creepy, the language eerily elegant, and the result not surreal entertainment but a pointed look at how the helpless, particularly women, are used and abused."
- Library Journal

"Elegant, lyrical, and beautifully written, a remarkable book about people trapped in a slave trade, surviving by making ritualized sense of what's happening. Like Scott Bradfield's The People Who Watched Her Pass By or Lydia Millet's My Happy Life, The Petals of Your Eyes reveals an imperfectly understood suffering that transforms into something else." – Brian Evenson. author of Immobility and Windeye

"Like a goddaughter of Angela Carter, Parkison builds this delirious poem-in-prose carefully, making a world of power-madness, melancholy, puppets, and vines. Read it for its erotic prose and lyrical weirdness!" – Stacey Levine, author of The Girl with Brown Fur

"There is much to be said for the violence of beauty and the beauty of violence. Let it be said here that it was said here. And that this will go on saying. as long as there is this writing." – Vanessa Place, author of Dies: A Sentence

From the Publisher