Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and O’Nights (Alice James Books, 2015), and the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2016). Her poems appear in Harvard Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Tin House, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

“In Cecily Parks’ beautiful poems, the natural world teeters between being and seeming—the seeming a simulacrum projected onto the world by a mind’s yearning, taxonomy and dread. Deeply metaphysical, and deeply attentive to our spiritual as well as physical uses and abuses of nature, O’Nights implicates language’s—indeed, lyric poetry’s—sad role in this endeavor.”
—Susan Wheeler

“Parks has strange, special eyes, and she sees the world unlike anyone else. In this book she’s discovered or uncovered a new (and by that I mean an overlooked ancient) kind of metaphor: how a thing  is more itself in its brokenness, in its reasserted self; a way for this to not merely be that—as in ordinary metaphors— but for this to be ever more this, no compromise, no lie, no way out. There is always more there, where Cecily Parks’ poetry is. Anything she looks at cannot shy away from her vision, revision, respect and re-creation. There is a weird world here, a beautiful and deep world (far from the untethered and glib musings skating on the surface of other kinds of contemporary poetry) that has wild air, real animals, a skin of weather and wonder, somehow hardcore, unflinching, the way a goddess might rule it. Parks is the golden voice of this world, singing in harmony that long song that only real poetry knows. Absolutely breathtaking.
—Brenda Shaughnessy