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Dispersals

On Plants, Borders and Belonging. A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worlds

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Dispersals

Written by: Jessica J. Lee
Narrated by: Jessica J. Lee
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Brought to you by Penguin.

A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worlds

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?

Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion.

In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them.

Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place"- whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hand.

Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in precise and poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they border cross, and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

© Jessica J. Lee 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

 Biological Sciences Emigration & Immigration Outdoors & Nature Science Social Sciences
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Critic Reviews

A stunning record of inheritance, memory and belonging . . . In Lee's writing, you feel the radical potential of the essay form; at once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life (Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water)
Profound, poetic, illuminating and moving, Dispersals' deep knowledge, sensitivity and research (worn so lightly) addresses just how entwined our fortunes, migration and language are with plants; how much we are part of nature. Important and vivid (Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down)
Contemplative, elegant, neatly structured . . . In a series of concise, interlocking essays, she entwines her personal story with the political history of different plants
The author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection. An insightful meditation on nature and identity within 'a world in motion
Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline . . . This deserves a wide audience
A beautiful book about belonging—plant and human. A work that will make you look at the orange in your hand, the moss underfoot, the tea that you sip a little more closely. Lee turns her careful gaze to the easy stories we tell ourselves about foreign and native, and leaves us with a vision of the world simultaneously more nuanced and more precious (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Starling Days')
Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings — by people and by plants — to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration
Dispersals is a beautifully written and complex book . . . [Lee] shows us with stunning prose, tenderness and precision the unexpected ways that we all connect and are connected by the plants around us (Amanda Thomson, author of ''Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home')
One of the most interesting and celebrated contemporary writers of nature, identity and place . . . her work deftly interweaves personal memoir and family history with botany, cultural criticism and first-hand observations of the natural world
Lee’s lyrical prose sprouts from a fertile ground of intensive research and intimate memories — memories that are by turns sharply vivid and pleasantly hazy with the distance of time . . . She moves seamlessly from seaweed to soybeans to citrus . . . Jessica J. Lee will make you stop and smell the weeds
All stars
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Beautiful writing style, lots of botanical info, laced with memoir tidbits. Lovely bit of nature writing!

Lovely essays on plants and personal history

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