Overview

new york ironweed was selected for the 2025 Ottoline Prize. new york ironweed is a field guide unlike any other. An intimate companion to take along with you on walks in New York or anywhere, new york ironweed's poems are energetic supersonic living beings. Intentionally ""imperfect,"" the electric poems invite typographical irregularities, mirroring ecological realities. The hyper-conscious poems emerge from our shared experience of climate and insect crisis, paying care and attention to the plants wildly growing from cracks in concrete. These strange, witchy creatures err without erring as they decompose like plants back into the soil. Deutch's plants-as-poems build new interspecies architectures through their transcendent being.

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Reviews

""new york ironweed is a stunning weed walk in words, a testament to the strong bond between plants and people. It speaks to us of our deepest need for connection amidst the ""messy urban wilderness"" that these poems take root in. There's something brilliantly poignant in the way that Deutch stitches words together, words that don't always seem to fit together, but create vivid images and end up making perfect sense. Feelings rather than thoughts emerge as the words unravel at the end of each poem, like plants decomposing back to soil. Deutch captures in new york ironweed our ""human need to forage in the city for each other's voices"" in this unique and impassioned weed walk through the city."" -- Rosemary Gladstar, Herbalist and author ""Amanda Deutch's new york ironweed is a joyful burlesque, a paean to weeds. Through boldly joyful poems, Deutch channels the mettle of these literally downtrodden beings--Wild Anemone, Field Horsetail, Smooth Hawksbeard--who thrive at the margins and in neglected spaces. They are the roots of our ecosystem, and thus our survival."" --Brenda Coultas ""I am fascinated by these poems, which unspool as something between a conversation with and the ventriloquism of plant life. In a tenderly restless voice, Deutch asks us to be with the urban flora delirium that thrums around us, that offers us new language, closer than we realize."" --Miguel Gutierrez ""Amanda Deutch's new collection new york ironweed is a heartfelt meditation on the otherworldly nature of the plants we easily dismiss around us. The ecopoetics, and ecopolitics, of new york ironweed is not in the ""humanity"" of plants but in the omnipresence and interconnection of all life, without hierarchy. This understanding goes through and beyond language as Amanda Deutch's experimental poems show as well as sense her life-long work with beings of both land and sea."" -- Tracie Morris, author, human/nature poems ""What's a poet to do? Well, it's with words, right? How words beget worlds, etc. etc. But what if there's no word for it, what if the ecstasy of life gets in the way? Folks, nothing to worry about IF the poet is herself Amanda Deutch, because she just creates the words as she needs 'em, or, as she writes: efjkfhjoe/dfeju/dweee/akjbbd. Yes, let the plants speak for themselves! Let them become the poems of this book! Let this book wake the world beyond words!"" -- Bob Holman, poet and co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance

""new york ironweed is a stunning weed walk in words, a testament to the strong bond between plants and people. It speaks to us of our deepest need for connection amidst the ""messy urban wilderness"" that these poems take root in. There's something brilliantly poignant in the way that Deutch stitches words together, words that don't always seem to fit together, but create vivid images and end up making perfect sense. Feelings rather than thoughts emerge as the words unravel at the end of each poem, like plants decomposing back to soil. Deutch captures in new york ironweed our ""human need to forage in the city for each other's voices"" in this unique and impassioned weed walk through the city."" Rosemary Gladstar, Herbalist and author. Amanda Deutch's new collection new york ironweed is a heartfelt meditation on the otherworldly nature of the plants we easily dismiss around us. The ecopoetics, and ecopolitics, of new york ironweed is not in the ""humanity"" of plants but in the omnipresence and interconnection of all life, without hierarchy. This understanding goes through and beyond language as Amanda Deutch's experimental poems show as well as her life-long work with beings of both land and sea. -- Tracie Morris, author, human/nature poems

Author Information

Amanda Deutch is a poet born and raised in New York City. She is the winner of the 2025 Fence Ottoline Prize for her collection, new york ironweed. Deutch's poetry has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Oversound, The Rumpus, Cimarron Review, and in many other journals and magazines. Deutch is the author of several chapbooks including Bodega Night Pigeon Riot (above/ground press, 2020), and Surf Avenue & 29th Street, Coney Island (Least Weasel Press, 2018). She lives in Brooklyn, where she is the founder of Parachute Literary Arts in Coney Island.

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