A new collection by Elee Kraljii Gardiner, sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. But the coastal temperate rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. Returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too.
Written in collaboration with a pulsating forest, sometimes, forest, simulates an alternate, and at times synesthesiac, perception of the natural world. These poems subvert flat human narratives of ecosystem function, beauty, or even wonder, asking us instead to sit uncomfortably at the edge of expression, where ‘all … patterns of growth and season come crashing.
— MADHUR ANAND
Author of Parasitic Oscillations
After and alongside catastrophe, sometimes, forest rots grammar at the root. We too become forest, as new languaging starts seeping through our dank and composty places. ‘This won’t take long,’ Kraljii Gardiner tells us, ‘but I promise / it will hurt.’ And still: I could walk this book’s desire paths for days.
— ASTRIDA NEIMANIS
Author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
