Aza Pace

Many of my poems are praise poems that reach for connection with other-than-human life, offering attention as a kind of care. I am fascinated by the encounter: finding a pressed lily in an old book next to handwritten notes about where the owner found it growing, or noticing the ways that a garden and forest blur together over time. Still, there is something unavailable and mysterious about plant life to me. I may be separated from the pressed flower and the human who picked it by more than a century, and then there are the living dangers of the forest edge, like thorns and toxins that keep plants safe and keep me from wading in. So, my poems try to explore these distances through the strange or uncanny, even as they search out small moments of potential kinship.