The Book of Flowers uses ecopoetic and surrealist imagery - as well as formal experimentation - to process grief in its many forms. McCrea explores the pain caused by losing a loved one, living on a dying Earth, and the violence queer and other marginalized bodies face through sharp imagery and cutting lines.
Even as she does so, McCrea's work always strains towards a light that can be found in liminality - in the dimension of experience that exists beyond total comprehension and language - that is nonetheless undeniable.
"As the title insinuates, these poems behave as personalized prayers which sustain the poet as she navigates immense grief, and introduce us to McCrea's brilliant and unparalleled voice. McCrea sows wonder and sorrow into the same soil and the poems that emerge are so full I almost expect petals to flutter from the pages." - Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck.
"Delilah McCrae's gorgeous debut, The Book of Flowers, tethers personal loss to existential and communal injury, climate apocalypse, divine inquisition, and queer pleasure. In a world heavy with metaphor and inuendo-religious, terrestrial, corporeal-McCrae's lines seek to clarify our relationship to the spiritual's capacity for holding sorrow: "Whoever we is, we know / that the real love is in the after." McCrae's care for formal complexity, active images, and the bewildering nature of belief is a gift. These ecologically soulful, grief-saturated mystical explorations turn our attention toward the sun." - Caryl Pagel, author of Twice Told.
