<div>Award winning poetry critic Ange Mlinko wrote of Parsons and his work, “The Renaissance man was once a courtly ideal; Parsons shows that it is a democratic ideal too—warm-blooded, muscular, as companionable on the page as in the flesh.” Both tangible and cerebral, Parsons’s poetry lifts its readers into a new, transformational reality with a depth of insight that is truly exceptional.<br><br><i>Reaching For Longer Wate</i>r brings the reader, the most compelling of his poems from his previous four collections, poems hailed by poetry luminaries, Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Robert Phillips, and Paul Mariani.<br><br>THE FRANK GAZE OF WOMEN<br>After Baudelaire’s “Exotic Scent”<br>Yes, yes, they bestow delights—<br>not only in the seedy way<br>we all know: they plant something<br>in the littoral vacancy<br>and in an instant there is an ineffable<br>fire—that forging force<br>on which so much more depends<br>than wheelbarrows &amp; chickens.</div>