Floralia

Kimberly Ann Priest captures the specter that haunts survivors of assault in Floralia, a stunning collection that is part poetry, part radio show, and part botany lesson. Priest skillfully uses the natural world-in particular, flowers-as a vehicle to explore traumatic dissociation from the self. Butterflies flutter, succulents burst forth in laughter, and amaranth is pondered as both an herb and a weed in gestures to raw violence both subtle and blunt. The radio show's protagonist converses with her own ghost, navigating the spectacle of her assault and the desire for it to be both witnessed and suppressed. I want you to notice the track marks on my arms is the plea in "Tell me you are listening"-another speaker seeking both witness and relief, again accenting the contradictory needs and desires of trauma. Floralia holds agony and mundanity in parallel, interrogating the performance of pain and its social response, whether from therapists, partners, the media-even you, the reader. Yet inside this dialectic tension between visibility and protection, Floralia manages to hope, with the possibility of healing and growth promised in a future spring's full and fragrant bloom.