American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide

by Susan Barba (Editor), Leanne Shapton (Illustrator)

Overview

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.

“The collection as a whole reminds us how lucky we are to share the world with this variety of shape and color, and to open our eyes to what grows on the side of the highway, between cracks in the sidewalk, along the riverbank.” —Boston Globe

Winner of a 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award

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 National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family—think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419760167
Publisher:	Abrams
Publication date:	11/08/2022
Pages:	340
Sales rank:	180,106
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

07/18/2022

Presented as a field guide with abstract watercolor illustrations by Shapton, this anthology offers a rich compendium of classic and contemporary writings inspired by wildflowers. The table of contents reads “List of texts, arranged by species,” in keeping with the motif that allows Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” to appear next to Henri Cole’s “Sunflower” (both under the header “ASTERACEAE / DAISY family”). Certain authors’ works appear in a category all their own, such as Denise Levertov’s “The Message,” in which forget-me-nots (of the order of Boraginaceae) are described as “Ripple of blue in which are/ distinct blues. Bold/ centaur-seahorse-salt-carnation/ flower of work and transition.” Whitman and Eliot appear under the Oleaceae/Olive family, while Lucille Clifton’s brief “flowers” reads: “here we are/ running with the weeds/ colors exaggerated/ pistils wild/ embarrassing the calm family flowers oh/ here we are/ flourishing for the field/ and the name of the place/ is Love.” The poems, essays, and letters collected span from the 18th century to today, making this a prismatic and dynamic work. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A significant addition to the tradition of writing about plants, this anthology urges us to notice the lessons offered by the tiniest bluet.”

*starred* review Bookpage

"A sensitive but substantial florilegium of poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present about wildflowers and their place in this world past, present, and future . . . The collection as a whole reminds us how lucky we are to share the world with this variety of shape and color, and to open our eyes to what grows on the side of the highway, between cracks in the sidewalk, along the riverbank."

Boston Globe

A luminous selection of essays, poems, and letters that leap and bound through mood, time and place, with writers of every shape and form from America’s foundation years to the present day”

Financial Times

A luminous selection of essays, poems, and letters that leap and bound through mood, time and place, with writers of every shape and form from America’s foundation years to the present day”
—Financial Times

"A sensitive but substantial florilegium of poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present about wildflowers and their place in this world past, present, and future . . . The collection as a whole reminds us how lucky we are to share the world with this variety of shape and color, and to open our eyes to what grows on the side of the highway, between cracks in the sidewalk, along the riverbank."—Boston Globe

“A significant addition to the tradition of writing about plants, this anthology urges us to notice the lessons offered by the tiniest bluet.”
—Bookpage, *starred* review

“This anthology offers a rich compendium of classic and contemporary writings inspired by wildflowers . . . a prismatic and dynamic work.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher