Bordighera Press | Illustrated by Deanna Dorangricha
This collection pays tribute to queer ancestors and traces a poetic lineage. Part unspooling manifesto that foregrounds lesbian power and joy while queering heteronormative culture.
—Peter Covino, translator of What Sex Is Death, Selected Poems by Dario Bellezza
… [A] book about gardening, growth, and the people and ideas that nourish us. In fact, it is a sort of cookbook where Santalucia combines bitter, sour, salty, and sweet words with wit and wild originality for maximum poetry umami.
—Elaine Equi, author of Out of the Blank
This is a book bursting with evidence of the wild landscape of a lesbian body growing older, one which demands witness and conversation.
—Ching-In Chen, author of Shiny City
A spiky adventure of queer formal innovation. Just pick up the book. You won’t put it down.
—Jason Schneiderman, author of Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire
Conversations in the Garden
I never thought I’d wake up with fruit in my pants and hear corn ring like a telephone. The lettuce is getting louder. The metallic underbelly of the raspberry bush rests on my tongue. I am not sure how to answer the corn, but now that I am here, I will pick and eat its ear.
The tomatoes are prostituting, and the fava beans popping. Which is to say, I garden now, and sometimes I forget that I used to fill my pockets with fruit and smash my fists against my body. I carry a ten-dollar bill in my sock and a picture of you in my shoe. A tribute to Bernice on her 80th birthday. To love in the shape of feet is to kick heaven right in the puff.
It must be our anniversary, all the tomatoes burst this morning. The sky yellow and purple flesh. Lesbians spread their seed under bruised clouds. We stand in the middle of everything in a garden next to the carrots in a box behind a fence. The neighbors weed around our ankles, stare out their kitchen windows, while the gay rain beats on our gay heads.
