The Book of Feral Flora

Fiction. Poetry. Ecopoetics. Amanda Ackerman’s THE BOOK OF FERAL FLORA collapses distinctions between narrative, poetry, and prose. Grafting stories to stones and written poems to plant rewrites generated via sensory-electronic technology, THE BOOK OF FERAL FLORA attempts to write the language of plants. From a tale of two sisters in the belly of a whale to the training of a young healer and texts written by the plants themselves, entire stories repeat, differences spread, and regrowth becomes inevitable. The result is an alchemical transformation of pastoral and romantic traditions in favor of the feral: a process of freeing, imaging in, and recovering human and non-human subjects. Ackerman worked with poetry programmer Dan Richert to produce the plant-generated poems. Read more about the process here.