Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging -- Jessica J. Lee, Hardcover

A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?

In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds: from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed; to those vilified but intimate, like soy; and those like kelp, on which our futures depend. Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being 'out of place'--weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

Author: Jessica J. Lee
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 03/12/2024
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.90w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781646221783

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 12/01/2023 pg. 107
Publishers Weekly 01/29/2024
Booklist 02/01/2024 pg. 7
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2024
Shelf Awareness 03/10/2024

About the Author
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and the children's book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Berlin.