Amelia Gorman - Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota

A delicate blend of ecological awareness and mythological sensibility, Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota lures the reader in with a semblance of clarity and rationality, and then tips you into a complex surreal world that resembles oursit is oursbut is also not. I want to wrestle with some of these poems until they yield meaning, but they dance, just out of reach, evanescent and tantalizing.

Deborah L. Davitt, author of The Gates of Never

A thoughtful and intelligent collection of one-page poems and elegant illustrations that slowly bud from gentle cricket song into a poison-leafed and weedy future. Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota is a thorned and exciting imagining where each specimen is handled as if by a daring and sun-smeared trickster, the delight in getting muddy and making up stories proudly prominent, and a refreshing pleasure in a collection of nature poetry.

Julie Reeser, author of Beak, Full of Tongue and Terracotta Pomegranate

This good book by Amelia Gorman really struck a nerve. Minnesota was my happy summer home for decades. Then some hideous things called Zebra Mussels showed up in the water and somehow seemed to ruin everything. It never occurred to me to write a dystopian book about the horror and alienation these things caused. I wish I had. This is a clever and enjoyable chapbook that captures the mood of how our lives are invaded by change.

John Philip Johnson, Pushcart Prize-winning science fiction writer and poet

Poems inspired by ecological destructionboth ongoing and potentialcan be difficult to pull off. But Amelia Gorman has triumphantly managed it here, turning to 21 different invasive species as springs for 21 different poems, ranging from short brutal lyrics to more complicated prose poems. Leaping between the now and near-future, they offer warning and hope in near measure, with lovely and shocking images. If you've never connected mute swans and pianos before now, nor contemplated the full meaning of your desire for an unblocked view - well, you will after this. A timely and needed collection, especially recommended for readers interested in poems that straddle the lines between the literary and the speculative.

Mari Ness, author of Through Immortal Shadows Singing and Resistance and Transformation: On Fairy Tales.

Brittle as the snow is gray,

she has secrets for one who will listen

We all miss the old world.

Being can count as an action

at four meters fathomed, she whispers

There is nothing safe about houses.

Submersed sybil of the Mississippi,

one day a year she rises, saying

Harvesting is hard for roots unwoven.

Oracle, nautical,

tells the traveler in noxious tones

Men drown when you choke their machines.

Boats beach themselves

in the storms on her winter shores

Sinking is its own reward,

Ice ghosts

decay along the floes

And breaking is its own survival strategy.

There is no catching the fruits that

shivered, quivered, and rivered inside you.

There is no eating back the bush

not with the help of goats or swine,

not fried into buckthorn flour pancakes.

There is only you

reckoning sand,

counting the replicating drupes

until the numbers get too large.

Forcing your way

through the ecophagic wood

as it slavers, quavers, and slivers

inside you.

And soon there will be no you.

Just endless, reproducing

thorns.

The meltwater came

in waves and walls

until the wood barriers rotted

and the metal rusted.

So we grew new dams,

living, green, and knotted

with botanic teeth to gnash

back the water, crusted

with barnacles and wire

to build up the frame

maintaining itself high

as the water. We trusted

the truce would stay the same

never thought the two plotted without us.

While cities crumble, we clasp

cast to cast, enough of us even

in them to come up worms

million mother, vertical father.

Dumped as so much half-bait

into brown lakes, algae-stained

by motors who had no faith

in our resurrection

dropped in water, in soil,

in swamp and concrete, underneath

the collapse we entwine

below the yellow air and lead

we filter yesterday's filth,

squeezing out our statues

and bringing them to life

demi-sister, half-brother

sculptor mother, dirt father.

In the future you can choose any death

as long as its by water.

Execution by currents column

or a drawdown, free-floating

or else tethered.

The executioners melody

is white with a yellow line

running through it,

a song that smells like its color,

like phosphor and eggs and sunlight.

Elodea knows where all the bodies are:

clinging to her.

Like the hangman from a fairytale

(the kind damned to live alone at the gallows),

she grows up here without a choice in the world.

You always wanted a necklace