A New Flora: Sapphic Poems from the Garden of Lesbos by Jessica Lowell Mason

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.

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.