Louisa Adjoa Parker

The very best fiction from Open Pen Magazine between 2016 and 2021.

Written while the author grieved the loss of a friend who took her life after a long struggle with mental illness, She Can Still Sing is a eulogy that projects from light. One part love letter to the mundane, three parts hymn to the departed, four parts ride of wonderment, these poems celebrate the bonds of friendship and family even as they leave love notes to the departed stuffed into surprising images. Louisa's connection to the environment is evident in nods to water and the earth's many-coloured bounty of flora – and, right through the pamphlet, there is a clear sense of the passage of time and its maintenance of the natural order of things, the cycle of life. Where there is grief, there is joy, and to lose sight of that might make of one “beating crimson wings/ against the glass of a window which can never/ be opened”.

A collection of eighteen short stories whose main focus is the experience of growing up black or mixed race in small towns in England's West Country.

A second edition of the raw, edgy and poignant début poetry collection of British Ghanaian author Louisa Adjoa Parker who began writing poetry to explore her feelings of being 'different' and the racism she experienced in her early years.

This is a collection of old and new poems by Louisa Adjoa Parker, exporing themes of race, identity, home, belonging, loss, and parenthood.