American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide By Susan Barba Review

Rating: 3 Stars

Release Date: November 8, 2022

Format: Ebook

Publisher: ABRAMS

First thing, this book is beautiful. The cover, the contents and the images all work together to create a work of art.

Susan Barba curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate the diversity that is both America and the nature that inhabits it. This collection has foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants.

There are rural writers, urban writers, female writers, Black writers, gay writers and indigenous writers. There are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi. There are poems from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley. At the start of every section, there are BEAUTIFUL watercolors by Leanne Shapton. I was excited to continue reading on to see what the next print would look like and I was never disappointed. Each print embodies the feeling you get when looking at wildflowers in nature.

Overall, this collection has a wide variety of types of texts and that might work for most people but I was really looking forward to the poetry aspect. There were a couple of essays that I felt dragged on for the topic and meandered their way to the point. While I understand the original author's intent, it did seem to stunt the flow of the collection and created some incongruencies among the rest of the beautifully curated collection.

My favorites were:

1. Work by Yusef Komunyakka

2. what woman by Deborah Diggs

3. The Steeple-Jack by Marianne Moore

4. What Beauty Does by Patricia Spears Jones

5. The Water Hyacinth by James Merrill and more.

Final Thoughts: If you love wildflowers and the natural world, you will love this book. It has a wide variety of topics and keeps you interested and would make a great gift.

Thank you Netgalley and Abrams for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.