A Prayer for Forgiving My Parents

Daun Daemon's debut collection, A Prayer for Forgiving My Parents, is both a commemoration and celebration. In recovering the past, Daemon unpacks the complicated and at times terrifying tensions within her family where the grit and gumption of a resourceful, entrepreneurial and tender mother is often undercut by a violent father. In such surroundings, a young person treads carefully and creatively. The poet says about her earliest years, "I was an origami child, folding myself into shapes." Yet, she succeeds in the way to love, appreciation, and even absolution. A Prayer for Forgiving My Parents is (to quote the poet's words about the door to her childhood bedroom) "a line of light pushing through the dark." A brave first collection.

-Maria Rouphail, PhD, is Senior Lecturer Emerita from the English Department at North Carolina State University. The author of three collections of poetry-Apertures, Second Skin, and most recently, All the Way to China-she is the poetry editor at Main Street Rag.



Few of us regard our childhoods without some ambivalence. Daun Daemon, unlike most, though, gives poignant voice to her memories, whether warm or painful, in poems recalling what it was to be a sensitive child alert to the baffling complexities of her mother and father. In a small-town North Carolina setting reminiscent of Eudora Welty's Mississippi world, the chatter of the beauty shop kept by Daemon's mother in one wing of the family home is heard again, the knowing looks exchanged between the savvy, affectionate mother and observant daughter are glimpsed once more, and the drunken rages of a frustrated father are always a threatening cloud. Daemon's wonderful poems depict a compelling journey on which a thoughtful, dreamy girl becomes the mature woman who writes about all this so well.

-Allen Stein is the author of two poetry collections: Your Funeral is Very Important to Us and Unsettled Subjects: New Poems on Classic American Literature. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous journals, among them The Hudson Review, Poet Lore, and Salmagundi.