Linda Parsons Marion’s fourth poetry collection, This Shaky Earth, straddles time, family divisionsand legacies, and the regions of her native Tennessee. From her grandmother’s indwellingkitchen and raggedy garden plot to now being a grandmother and gardener herself, she cultivatesthe lessons and language of the past in her own backyard. Marion’s poems are leavened with ahunger to understand the upheavals of childhood and its growing pains, to be fed full to burstingon life’s vegetable immensity, to face the passing seasons with grace, where all she knows of thisblack-eyed earth is perishing even as it flowers.