Orchid Tierney

Writing for flora feels a foolish endeavor—and failed one—but I’m intrigued by the idea that plants have an intelligence and wit with personhood even if their creative expression remains so removed from our perspective. The poems included in Plant-Human Quarterly are from my most recent manuscript that imagines what strange plant-life might emerge some three hundred years into a Midwestern climate-settled future when humankind and personhood, as we understand it, have likewise evolved to accommodate new ecological entanglements. And I take these entanglements literally. Each prose poem is written from the perspective of the flora themselves and coupled with an AI generated image that combines real Midwest plants with other lifeforms: plants, animals, insects, vehicles, buildings, and people, among other oddities. Rather than yield to the determinist narratives of disaster that typically accompany climate fiction, the goal of this project is to explore climate enmeshment as a space for possibility and hope.