PARABLES AND PORTRAITS
HarperCollins, 1991

This book — which Richard Wilbur called “fresh, plain, profound, funny, and full of Zen ambushes” — is comprised of fifteen verse portraits and forty-seven prose poems and parables, all of them filled with Stephen Mitchell’s unique Judeo-Zen humor. The pieces range through history and myth, and investigate, encounter, or become such figures as Spinoza, Freud, Eve, Hitler, Cinderella, Faust, Montaigne, Achilles, and Jonah, and the illustrious camel who passed through the needle’s eye. “In Parables and Portraits,” Jim Harrison wrote, "we find work of the first order, poems of improbable directness and integrity that everyone who reads poetry will want to own."