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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Miles P. Grier, "Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
Raul Palma, "A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens" (Dutton, 2023)
Michael Quinn Dudley, "The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy" (Cambridge Scholars, 2023)
Courtney Denelle, "It's Not Nothing" (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2022)
Patrick R. O'Malley, "The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
Mark Ernest Pothier, "Outer Sunset" (U Iowa Press, 2023)
Jessica Romney, "Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
Roland Allen, "The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper" (Profile Books, 2023)
Rebecca Turkewitz, "Here in the Night" (Black Lawrence Press, 2023)
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Amanda Kennell, "Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
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Kyle Dillon Hertz, "The Lookback Window" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)
Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
Craig Keener, "Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels" (Eerdmans, 2019)
Timothy K. August, "The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America" (Temple UP, 2020)
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Lexi Freiman, "The Book of Ayn" (Catapult, 2023)
Joseph Vogel, "James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era" (U Illinois Press, 2018)
Annie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016)
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