Garden of the Fugitives

An Ivorybill in Arkansas, which human guilt has conjured up from extinction; mud daubers toting “stunned spiders” to their nests on a screened porch in Louisiana; a whale shark off the Yucatan whose spots tell its story in indecipherable Braille; conchs harvested from an undersea garden in the Caymans; stray dogs in Athens, ancient gods in disguise—the lives of these creatures and others entwine with ours in The Garden of the Fugitives.

Loosely based on the story of Eve, this collection of poems takes the reader from Eden into a fallen world.  Exploring the tense relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, and human beings and other species, these poems lead to Pompeii’s memorial to the “ash people” in The Garden of the Fugitives, where parents and children, inside their husks of plaster, never stop dying to the singing of bees.

WISTERIA
Oozing perfume,
the vine kills exquisitely
in such high style.

The trees have no idea
what’s happening to them.