American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide

Organised as a field guide, American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide is a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers—perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike.

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: there are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighbourhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, and indigenous writers.

Featured are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi. The anthology includes prose pieces by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and most notably, there are poems from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz, and Jericho Brown.

The book includes exquisite watercolours by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organised by species and botanical family—think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.