Susan Barba – Författare

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 alikeAmerican 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 Gwendolyn Brooks, 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.

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. The second section consists of a series of prose poems titled Andranik. In these poems, a child is speaking with her grandfather who relates, in answer to her questioning, the details of his survival during the Armenian Genocide: his escape, the deaths of loved ones, forced marches, enslavement all punctuated by memories of an earlier, happier boyhood. The final section contains shorter lyric poems set mainly in New England, poems that explore the proximity of life and death, the complicity and interdependency of the individual in the collective, and the redemptive possibilities of sympathy.

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 MagazineSusan Barba’s collection of poems resembles the spheroid stone of its name; when cracked open, a glittering and fascinating crystalline structure is revealed but the stony sphere she offers us, and the beauty within, is nothing less than the earth.The word “geode” also houses within it “ode,” a praise poem. With both anguish and exaltation, Barba considers our time within the larger scale of deep-time. The species decreasing in number and disappeared and the possibility of human extinction haunt this book, while new generations and the possibility of renunciation of our old ways animate it. There is wonder here as well. She writes...Oak, whose girthexceeds my reachforever I amat your feet,looking up.Here is the world, Barba reminds us, like a ball, in our hands. Poems include “Earthwards,” “Letter from Gaia,” “River,” and “Final Letter of Stone.” geode is for anyone who loves poetry’s uniquely precise and enduring power.