The Petals of Your Eyes - Softcover

"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"

"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"

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.