Peeling off sheets of skin from a sunburned back. Visiting five nurseries and spending $1,000 in an afternoon. Raising 200 monarch butterflies. Hearing the wing beats of geese thirty feet overhead at sunset. How one piece of mulch can make all the difference. These are the stories of Benjamin Vogt's 1,500 foot native prairie garden over the course of three years. After a small patio garden at his last home teases him into avid tinkering, the blank canvas of his new marriage and quarter acre lot prove to be a rich place full of delight, anguish, and rapture in all four seasons. Full of...
Peeling off sheets of skin from a sunburned back. Visiting five nurseries and spending $1,000 in an afternoon. Raising 200 monarch butterflies. Hearin...
"Afterimage" moves from the southern to northern Plains and the eastern Midwest, where the natural world calls out through deep lakes and dark woods, and finally through transient moments framed by gardens: a butterfly nectaring on a coneflower, planting lavender with his future wife, or autumn leaves crashing against a morning window. In a rich array of forms and evocative imagery, the poems in "Afterimage" reach through prairie history until grass becomes skin, and light becomes shadow.
"Afterimage" moves from the southern to northern Plains and the eastern Midwest, where the natural world calls out through deep lakes and dark woods, ...