In these prose poems, I've recorded my haunting romance with the famous Valentine Garden (which is now a ruin), created by landscape architect Isabelle Greene in the foothills of Santa Barbara, California. Jealous of Isabelle’s power to affect a dynamic experience of space, I tried to make language play faithfully in the game coursing between the body and Greene’s fiercely stirring landscape. The poems, like the garden, are complex and explorative. Their interests are survival, forage and repair, the act of making, accumulation and overflow that results in flowering and eventually gives way to loss.
Finalist for the National Poetry Series, Fence Ottoline Prize, and California Book Award
Available from Nightboat Books and booksellers.