Review by Booklist Review
My whole life feels like a metaphor these days," poet Dungy writes to a friend as she describes repotted African violets, "They're struggling now. But they're hanging on." In this memoir that winds through her attempts at rewilding her yard in Fort Collins, CO; into stretches of her family history; deep into Dungy's roles as a mother, Black woman, and poet; across an expanse of scientific evidence about chemical harms and natural treasures in our environment; through the difficulty of parenting during COVID-19 school closures; and into the politics that underpin nearly every element of life, metaphor is everywhere, and all the more significant in its plainness. Gardening, poetry, motherhood, history--dirty and beautiful, difficult and sublime, the agony of failure, the exhalation of a spring bloom. Throughout, Dungy's identity as a Black mother offers an inclusive and more realistic style of nature writing than her models in Muir, Oliver, or Dillard--one that can't abide long solitary sojourns in the forest but must contend with work schedules, systemic injustices, and breakfast dishes. Dungy's poetic ear illuminates her language, whether listing botanical names or reflecting on the tumult of the 2020s. A significant, beautiful, meditative, and wholly down-to-earth memoir with high appeal for book groups and nature lovers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this meditative outing, poet Dungy (Guidebook to Relative Strangers) reflects on race and history while discussing the garden she maintains outside her Colorado home. "No matter how many years have passed, no perennial in life's garden roots more deeply than history," she contends, using her garden as a metaphor to explore the complex historical relationship between Black Americans and the land. She tells of moving in 2013 with her husband and young daughter, Callie, to a majority-white neighborhood in Fort Collins, Colo., where she started a plot of flowers and vegetables in her yard. Gardening, she writes, helps her "feel rooted," and she recounts taking pains to explain to Callie the difference between their choosing to garden and the labor of enslaved people forced to work the land. Poems inspired by nature appear throughout, serving as connective tissue for ruminations on the garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, 19th-century naturalist John Muir's racism and sexism, and the overlap between environmental and racial justice. Fans of Dungy's poetry will delight in her sparkling prose, and the wide-ranging meditations highlight the connections between land, freedom, and race. It's a lyrical and pensive take on what it means to put down roots. Photos. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
When Dungy and her family moved to Fort Collins, CO, in 2013, she wanted to create a garden of drought-tolerant and pollinator-supporting plants, but the community had restrictions on what could be grown. In resistance to these homogenous policies, her garden became a vehicle for observations on her life, motherhood, the past, current events, and environmental justice. In this book, Dungy (English, Colorado State Univ.; Guidebook to Relative Strangers) uses her garden as a way to reflect on her heritage) uses her garden as a way to reflect on her heritage and her life. Along the way, she imparts lessons to readers about interconnectedness, belonging, language and learning, all the while writing about pressing environmental issues, such as global warming, natural disasters, and urbanization. Dungy further explores the challenges of being Black in the United States, particularly after the 2016 election. She also comments on the effects that segregation has on Black people and the erasure of people of color from environmental narratives. The author examines life in the COVID era by showing the difficulties of balancing a career and parenthood during a period of additional demands and uncertainty. Throughout, Dungy deftly interconnects environment and social justice issues. VERDICT A poignant portrait of life and its challenges, told through the beauty of nature.--Rebekah Kati
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Black poet's memoir of motherhood, gardening, and environmental justice. In 2020, Dungy, an English professor at Colorado State, located in the majority-White city of Fort Collins, received a Guggenheim fellowship, allowing her to take a break from teaching and focus on documenting her project of transforming what had been a conventional suburban lawn into a pollinator garden full of native plants. "I was supposed to devote the year to capital-P Poetry," she writes. Then the pandemic hit, requiring her daughter to attend school remotely, and in the fall, one of the many wildfires that roared through the state came within miles of destroying the family home--and with it, the garden. Instead of the conventional nature narrative, in which an individual--most often White and well-off--communes with nature, Dungy offers a more complex, nuanced story in which the experience of nature is vital but is also entangled with race, national and family history, motherhood, and more. The text is the literary equivalent of the garden Dungy gradually coaxed into being: lively, messy, beset by invasive weeds, colorful, constantly changing, never quite under control, and endlessly interconnected. Some of the book is about the garden itself--the process of ripping up sod and putting down new earth only to have the wind attack it; the cherished birds who eat the seeds of the sunflowers and sometimes rip up their petals and leaves; and the plants themselves, whose names and evolution the author vivifies on the page. Other parts of the book are about tangential subjects: American bison, the early years of Dungy's marriage in California, the history of a garden in Virginia, the work of painter Mary Cassatt, and the murders of Black men by police. While the threads don't always cohere neatly, they form a whole that reveals a remarkable mind in constant motion. Sometimes thorny but deeply felt, fluidly written, and never boring. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
