Overview

A 'flora' acts as a compendium of the lifeforms that define and are foundational to a particular geography or time period. In our social world, 'flora' act as signs and signifiers of core life-sustaining characteristics that comprise and make recognizable a time or place, recalled by memory in relics, both psychic and natural. But what about the flora that have been lost to time? What about the flora we haven't yet created? A New Flora: Sapphic Poems from the Garden of Lesbos is an answer to the questions of flora. The collection conjures the flora of the lost age of Sappho of Lesbos through poetic meditations written in some recent present. The poems of the collection are both past and present, rooted in death and life. They express an ardent desire for a new flora: a new period of growth, a new language and way in the world, but they also pay deep homage to the necessary death inherent in such transformations. The early poems in the collection address limitation and pain in an anticipation of what's to come. Sapphic desire is the gardener of this new flora that pushes its way up out of the earth of old ways- it is a passage through death and desire into the question of what we might make of this new unknown. A New Flora is a worldling that broods and blooms stories and songs of lesbian love and Sapphic survival as an answer to an overgrowth of violence, death, and trauma. The work is a remembrance of a Sapphic age and a wish for a long-awaited return.

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Reviews

These are poems that force the mind and heart to work together in fierce compassion, unthinkable beauty, and ascent out of grief. They are poems that refuse to separate the scream from saturation, denying ecstasy its simplicity, fusing heritage with horror and delicate surprises. Drawing on ever so many illusions to become an elegy and sexualized journey at once, they do not glorify or extinguish what humans and nature have ravished or planted. They make love itself into the wizard of it all. A truly magnificent body of work. -Erika Duncan, Founder and Director of Herstory Writers Network In A New Flora, Jessica Lowell Mason gives us ""dreaming/flora fire, blue-red"" passionate poems that embrace garden metaphors, powerful elements of nature, to express love-and-more among women. Truly this collection is ""the tree that lives,"" clear in emotion, insistent that we appreciate what blooms, grows, survives. -Katharyn Howd Machan, author of A Slow Bottle of Wine With her beautiful collection of vivid eco-poetic sapphic erotics in A New Flora, Jessica Lowell Mason transports the reader into another place and time. Mason features an array of more-than-human protagonists in her evocative ecofeminist worlding. Her poems of nature are peppered with sensitive reflections on death and loss. Her deliberate echoing of individual words and lines emphasize the rhythm and import of the reflections she calls forth through her poetry. In these works of fierce lesbian love and desire, Mason imprints an earthy and ethereal sensuality in the queer relationships she weaves between women, nature, shadow and light. -Glynnis Reed-Conway, Co-editor of BIPOC Alliances: Building Communities and Curricula This exquisite book elevates and transports the reader. Revering and reimagining the rich ""Herstory"" tradition, A New Flora contributes to a Sapphic poetics, coming alive and taking you from the distraction of life's potent weeds to the joy of roaming in a glorious garden of blooming flowers in their prime. -Kathleen Bryce Niles, Editor Emerita of The Comstock Review These poems, a garden of flowers beyond ""the gates of trembling,"" invite us to consider grief and rebellion, love and sex, motherhood and lesbianism. The poet, tender, sometimes ferocious and divinely feminine, opens for us her own intensely personal ""library of desire,"" which pulls both ways, toward death and the past, and toward the fierce and fragile possibility of future. -Anna Quon, Poet Laureate for Halifax, Nova Scotia 2024-2027

Author Information

Jessica Lowell Mason is an instructor with the Bard Prison Initiative, an adjunct instructor at Niagara University and the University at Buffalo, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies and research assistant with the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her first book of poetry, Straight Jacket, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019.

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