A Trickle of Bloom Becomes You

Finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize

It would be hard to measure all I learned from this book—a carefully researched and elegantly crafted guide to the history of botany and women’s queer history therein. The speaker’s knowledge is commanding, the poet’s skill on full display. Whatever they combine to show me— “a clandestine marriage, a bit/ of Cryptogamia,” “each winged alga suspended/ in Prussian blue”—I willingly believe.
—Julie Marie Wade, judge of Charlotte Mew Contest

This collection of poems bursts with originality and beauty. In Rouse’s work, we see the dazzling intersection of women, history, botany, and sexuality. This poet uses the past to explore contemporary questions that women continue to face. “What if you were beautiful but no one told you?” Why are women’s stories so often fueled by shame or regret? Even when these poems focus on plants, they bring historic women, some lost in the archives, back to vibrant life. As though through a microscope, the poet’s eye sees the dynamism of flowers. Science may take the lead, but all the senses are fully engaged in Rouse’s animated Garden of Eden. Botany has never been so erotic as it is in these poems.
—Robin Reagler, author of Into The The and Teeth & Teeth

I love how this collection brings me into the garden, history, science: the hidden heroines of the Victorian study of botany. All of this through tender, considered, beautiful and precisioned language. Poems that cross borders; that take the framework of a garden, of language, how science moves us from the unimagined to the proved, through the stages of observation, record, annotation; and how the natural world—and by implication love, the movements of our human bodies—defies this: overflows, overspills, can transform through all these borders and control.
—SK Grout, author of What love would smell like