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

Cover: Tree Talk by Ariel Gordon. An award circle shows the text: Nominee Candidat. E: Les Prix du livre du Manitoba, Manitoba Book Awards. A white-outlined illustration shows against a green background of a sidewalk. Two shops, Poppy and Deno's Pawn Shop are located at the right of the sidewalk. A signboard and a couple of cycles are seen in front of Deno's Pawn Shop, and Sherbrook Inn is on the upper level. An American Elm tree is in front of Poppy. A few buildings are alongside Poppy. A few electrical poles are seen behind.

Advance Praise for TreeTalk

That these poems started out as leaves can be felt in the reading. There is a vitality to this work that is verdant. The poems read as if they are still outside, golden- houred. Ariel Gordon has curated a space for herself and for her community in the company of an elm. And we are the fortunate recipients of a collection to share, to read aloud, for the tree of it. — Sue Goyette

Ariel Gordon, truly the Jane Jacobs of trees and poetry, has charmed a multitude of strangers and passersby to sing small songs to the urban canopy, to whisper their secrets and confessions to a neighbourhood elm tree. The result is TreeTalk, a celebration of the city-dweller’s relationship with trees, but also an elegy to the stress and devastation imposed on urban nature in the course of growing and developing a city. In TreeTalk, Ariel Gordon not only re-foliates a tree with poems, she adds a startling and crucial layer of leaves to how we might (re)imagine ourselves coexisting with nature. — Sylvia Legris

An outlined illustration of a sidewalk.

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TreeTalk

TreeTalk

Ariel Gordon

With illustrations by Natalie Baird

logo: At Bay Press.