Until the Red Swallows It All
By Mason Parker
Published by Trident Press, 2022
159 pages, paperback
Sometimes sinister and sometimes playful, Mason Parker’s essays and vignettes attempt the nearly impossible task of capturing the true magnitude of our ecological situation. Until the Red Swallows It All tells stories of people formed by landscape and examines Oklahoma after the big fracking boom, a microcosm of something even more expansive than the open plains or seemingly endless hills. This collection is like a John Prine album or a hillbilly Walden. By veering in and out of the political, but mostly by peering through the lens of the personal, Parker’s work reconciles our past with a future beyond our control, or even understanding.
Praise for Until the Red Swallows It All...
“Mason Parker has a heart. It floods with the rain, cracks with the wildfires, and glows with the bioluminescence of a midsummer firefly.” -Shy Watson, author of Horror Vacui.
“Mason Parker has given us the rarest of gifts: a book that is true, a straight shot distilled from the grit and tears of the broken heart land.” -Richard Manning, author of If It Sounds Good, It Is Good: Seeking Subversion, Transcendence and Solace in America’s Music.
“The fierce, urgent language in Until the Red Swallows It All never lets us forget what has been lost, or what might have been, even as it tells a survivor’s tale.” -Phil Condon, author of River Street.
“Twining boyhood ritual with a young man’s regrets and joys, [Parker] arrives at a sharp sense of the Now - a time when fierce objection to our environmental catastrophe requires equally fierce celebration of what remains, in spite of us.” -Robert Michael Pyle, author of The Thunder Tree.
