Dispersals
On Plants, Borders and Belonging
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- S/ 42.90
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- S/ 42.90
Descripción editorial
‘An invigorating cross-pollination of memoir and natural history, both beautifully phrased and delicately structured—this book deserves your time and attention’ Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worlds
A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?
Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion.
In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them.
Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place"- whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hand.
Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in precise and poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they border cross, and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.
'At once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life’ Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these genre-defying essays, Lee (Two Trees Make a Forest), a creative writing instructor at the University of Cambridge, discusses the peregrinations of plant species in relation to her family's migrations. Born to a Welsh father and Taiwanese mother while both lived in Canada in the 1970s, Lee contends that the contrasting teatime rituals of her maternal and paternal grandparents speak to the historical rifts between China and Britain over the tea plant. She chronicles how Britain supplied China with opium from its Indian colonies in exchange for tea, which was subject to import tariffs that funded Britain's colonial enterprise. Reflecting on the pine species she's encountered while living in Canada, England, and Germany, Lee describes the trees "as migrants making do" for their resilience, adaptability, and easily spread seeds. Elsewhere, she traces the domestication of soybeans in connection with her grandmother's family's soy sauce business and how humanity's interventions in the natural world make it difficult to determine whether species are invasive or native. Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline (in the poignant final essay addressed to her newborn child, Lee writes, "Above us the hawthorn leafs out against a pale blue sky. You watch the play of light and shadow it creates, cooing each time you round your lips and exhale"). This deserves a wide audience.
