All the plants I have half-grown by Linden K McMahon
From the inevitable anxiety of ecological crisis, the ecopoems in All the plants I have half-grown follow the strange, uncomfortable, glorious, glittering threads that link us to our ecologies, carefully pulling us through the magic of queer kin-making and towards a sense of reciprocity and belonging.
Linden K McMahon is a writer, performer, and arts & nature connection facilitator – they write about human connections with ecologies, utopian dreams, belonging, and queer joy.
“I have rarely read poems that try so honestly to enter into relationship with the non-human: plants, birds, fungi, land. McMahon’s poems are acts of connection, committed to imagining better. ‘The words link [us] to the lives that swirl around us’, knowing this work is tricksy and incomplete and doing it anyway. The poems are full of play and song and mourning: a mourning that is active, that goes out to plant and grow.” – Miriam Nash
“These poems have good rich soil under their fingernails. Speak to an intimate relationship with ecology, Linden McMahon is singing through the hard and rewarding work of growing a world of kinship, of reciprocity. With deep love and furious heartbreak, the lyrics here map out ways of knowing the world and each other that offer precious hope. There’s wide-eyed wonder here, but earthly knowledge too. The writing refuses cynicism and embraces a bodily experience of reality. Like all the best gardens, this pamphlet is full of flowers and thorns, full of rich scents and tangled roots, and is always growing towards the sun.” – Harry Josephine Giles
“The first thing All the plants I have half grown asked me to do was breathe. The book walks through gardens and forests and seasides, but always with its mind on the earth, the secret mycorrhizal networks thrumming under our feet. The pressures of the city, the demands of the built environment are always present, but these poems push back against their pressures, take their forms from the spaces between, like shoots between paving-stones. McMahon’s poems, particularly the quietly rhapsodic “Fairlight Glen”, insist that our bodies have roots, too, and learning to tend to them is the work of a lifetime.” – Dave Coates
Stewed Rhubarb
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