The Botanical Garden by Ellen Welcker
A careful poet will find herself again and again faced with the difficulty of capturing the quiddity of things without reducing or stripping them of their strangeness, of telling us about the world without seeming to claim ownership..In Welcker's hands, the stable categories...that allow us to organize and discipline our emotional responses to others--that allow us to define away the compassion we ought to feel--are made suspect. The resulting book is unsettling, unforgettable, a map of the world that respects no borders, respects no limiting names, and reminds us that "Counting is a system that does not involve seeing." -- Levi Stahl (The Quarterly Conversation).
I feel so grateful to live in a world that has books such as The Botanical Garden. Lyric elegy, futuristic science fiction, aliens and whales, oulipian listing. it is all here in this beautifully moving book. -- Juliana Spahr ( NUCLEAR, THIS CONNECTION OF EVERYONE WITH LUNGS, and THE TRANSFORMATION)
