A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books, 2023) adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.
For a better understanding of this collection and the author, the following books are recommended by translator Dr. Jon Pitt:
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Chloe Wigston Smith, "Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Yale UP, 2024)
Kimberly King Parsons, "We Were the Universe" (Knopf, 2024)
Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds
Adrienne Brown, "The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)
Amrita Ghosh, "Kashmir's Necropolis: Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts" (Lexington Books, 2023)
Benjamin Balint, "Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy" (Norton, 2019)
Thersa Matsuura, "The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth" (Adams Media, 2024)
Robert Cochran, "Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis" (U Arkansas Press, 2024)
Polo B. Moji, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives" (Routledge, 2022)
Sohini Pillai, "Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Rebecca Copeland, "Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Gina Chung, "Green Frog: Stories" (Vintage, 2024)
Eileen M. Hunt, "The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Edwin McRae, "Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds" (Narrative, 2024)
Chris Haufe, "Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Jan Baetens, "Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
Adi Mahalel, "The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Jesse McCarthy, "The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
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