In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet's rapidly evolving reality where ?kindness is a scar,? though ?not all scar-makers are kind. ,?" Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of "?after??post-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-death?these poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life.