Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers--perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike.
American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighborhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, indigenous writers. There are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi. There are prose pieces by Aldo Leopold, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. And most of all, there are poems: from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz and Jericho Brown.
The book includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family--think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.
Susan Barba is a poet, translator, and editor for the New York Review of Books. She is the author of Fair Sun (2017) and geode (2020), a finalist for the New England Book Awards, and the Massachusetts Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, Antioch Review, Raritan, and Harvard Review. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Leanne Shapton is an artist, writer, and publisher. Her illustrations appear on many book covers including Women in Clothes, a collaborative project with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits on fashion, and her own Swimming Studies, which won the 2012 National Book Critic's Circle Award for autobiography. She is the cofounder of art house publisher J&L Books alongside photographer Jason Fulford, and lives in New York City.
Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers—perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike
American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world
A New England Book Award Finalist. "Rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth...Poems acting as guides, helping us navigate and remember..."--New York Times Magazine
Three interrelated sections of poetry which explore the primary importance of connection, between humans and with the natural world. In the first section, the poems are wide-ranging, exploring the acquisition of language, the ways in which the experience and distance embedded in language darken and threaten the qualities of a childhood spent close to the natural world.
"Reading [Guestbook] feels akin to walking through an art exhibit, each piece linked in ways that are ineffable but clear. . . yearning, like a ghost, lingers long after the stories are done." --NPR
One of our most imaginative writers and artists explores the visitations that haunt us in the midst of life, and reinvents the very way we narrate experience.
A dreamy exploration of relationships and jealousy . . . pithy and deadpan . . . It's no self-help book." --Salon
Leanne Shapton gives voice to the toys on our shelves in this wry yet tender children’s book
