TreeTalk

By Ariel Gordon and Natalie Baird

During the heatwave of July 2017, Ariel Gordon spent two days sitting on the patio of downtown Winnipeg’s Tallest Poppy, writing snippets of poems which she hung from the boulevard tree using paper and string. Passersby were invited to TreeTalk too — their secrets / one-liners / meditations / haiku were also hung from the tree. By the end of the weekend, the elm had a second temporary canopy of leaves: 234 poems, 111 written by Gordon, 107 written by passersby, and 16 from other sources.

Gordon has assembled all these voices into a long/found poem that asks: what does it mean to live in the urban forest? What does it mean to be in relationship with each other but also with the more-than-human? The book also includes pen and ink illustrations by Winnipeg artist Natalie Baird.

Since 2017, Gordon has also hung poems in trees at the Sage Hill Poetry Experience in Muenster, SK, the Prairie Gate Literary Festival in Morris, MN, and at the Winnipeg Folk Festival as part of the Prairie Outdoor Exhibition. Stay tuned for more TreeTalk-ing!

• Language: English
• Publisher: At Bay Press
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988168890

Ariel Gordon

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based author of two collections of urban-nature poetry, both of which won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Gordon also co-edited the anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House, 2018) and is the ringleader of the National Poetry Month in the Winnipeg Free Press project. Her most recent book is Treed: Walking in Canada's Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019).

Book preview

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