Kathryn Petruccelli

I understand the larger world most clearly when I'm studying a tiny space within it — preferably a few square inches. For example, of my garden: the cucumber flowers, the beautifully evil squash beetles, a zinnia seedling. It's amazing, but also manageable, just like the space of a poem.

The poems included here come from a series I wrote around flora from the U.S. west coast that I desperately miss, living, as I currently do, on the opposite coast. The poems are all meant to be epistles—I speak directly to the plants. It allowed me a freedom and intimacy I think I would have bypassed had I tried to write about them.

Writing requires connection to the essential, to our true essence, so it makes sense that I'd want to draw from what is also foundational and pure. Plants provide me with a base point, an exhale from which to begin. In addition, plants denote place—my most-frequented theme and something that has always been fraught for me. I've left places I love and struggled to find where I should be. The botanical world shares none of this locational doubt. It is literally grounded. Don't we want to be near the thing that possesses qualities with which we struggle? Through examining botanica, I get to borrow their rooted life, their authenticity; they don't apologize for their ostentation—or their dying. Writing into memory and desire via landscape frames those memories and wants in the most natural ornamentation while I press my human wonderings onto the picture that emerges.