Slater Orchard

An intensely personal, surreal imagining of how humans might survive industrialization

In Slater Orchard, a cleaning woman navigates a half-imaginary world ravaged by industrial waste and pollution. As she labors to grow pear trees in a dumpster, appearances unravel around and within her, and the orchard becomes a burial ground. We begin to question both the reliability of the narrator and of consensual reality.

With sharp wit and precise diction, Darcie Dennigan calls on and works in the lineage of great modernist women, from Clarice Lispector to Marie Redonnet. Slater Orchard is thoroughly contemporary in its themes, however, evincing dire questions of rampant capitalism and climate change that are rapidly changing our world and the exigencies of living in it.