news | Friday July 19, 2024

lettuce lettuce please go bad Has Arrived!

Hot off the press! The new poetry and art collection lettuce lettuce please go bad by Tiziana La Melia has arrived. Using the idea of compost as composition – since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life – the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing rituals, the cycles of the moon, experiences of stress and grief, and inherited and invented agricultural practices to tease out a poetics of rural embodied language. Situated at the moment when thought becomes image, lettuce lettuce please go bad expands on the author’s personal history of familial migration and agrarian labour – picking, pruning, grafting, tending, planting – entangled in issues of colonization, land manipulation, ownership, extraction, and food production.

An excerpt:

“I guess because we left I longed for the pink drought revealing the
artificial lake’s bottom of prickles and salt crust

I invited everyone to the farm where no one wants to be a farmer
and the family living there was born into it

Then one day I wanted to get married because I wanted everyone to
meet at a party before we die

Everyone met. Love was exchanged and lost. Some died after”

In an effort to think through the ways vegetables, fruits, and other foods can stand in for complex situations and emotions, La Melia reconsiders how value is allotted and advocates a return to love to mitigate both personal and collective crises. Order a copy here.