The Botanical Garden

by Ellen Welcker

Poetry. Winner of the 2009 Astrophil Poetry Prize. Foreword by Eleni Sikelianos. "I feel so grateful to live in a world that has books such as THE BOTANICAL GARDEN. Lyric elegy, futuristic science fiction, aliens and whales, Oulipian listing. It is all here in this beautifully moving book"—Juliana Spahr.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2010

About the author

Ellen Welcker’s first book, The Botanical Garden, was begun in the San Francisco Botanical Garden and completed (while gestating an alien) in Nevada and Vashon Island, Washington. Her poems and critical writing have appeared in Tinfish, Shampoo, Mudlark, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Quarterly Conversation, and Gently Read Literature, among others. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program, and she lives in Seattle.

Reviews

[Shel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intriguing intersection and transposition of babies, whales, refugees, immigrants, and aliens naming exotic locales and exploring rites of birthing and passage.

I find myself flipping through this in non-linear fashion reading it in lapping, little waves.

Pairs well with: Melville's Moby Dick, The Whale and world news

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful meditation on motherhood and the boundaries (international and otherwise) we are all crossing. Some of the phrases live with me still.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful work that shifts the reader effortlessly between love, wonder, environmental destruction and cruelty, through the experience of motherhood, refugees and endangered species.

[Sarah Maker · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do immigration, migration, infertility, and motherhood fit together? I don't know, but they do, and beautifully. Let's hear it for modern poetry that's not at all pretentious.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very timely collection about borders, pollution, and bodies in motion--metaphorical and actual. Whales; immigrants; border walls; gestation; a map of the world--all find their place here in an extended and somewhat surreal reflection that ends in a glorious wave of profusion.