Publisher's Synopsis
Looking back over family tradition and her own trajectory, Charise Hoge reminds us, and herself, in Inheritance of Flowers, of the ways that gardens and gardening can draw a line of coherence through lives filled with change and transience. An "upturned worm, wriggling dirt's desire" becomes "a tiny Eden in the making." In fresh and original free-verse enlivened by strong formal impulses, Hoge creates a canny music with echoes of Hopkins, Dickinson, and Blake, but entirely her own. These are poems one wants to sit with, taking the time to let them bloom.
--Jean Nordhaus, author of The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn and The Music of Being
As the granddaughter of a florist, poet Charise Hoge is an actual flower child. Yet the natural world of her lineage is one of cultivated beauty, in which Easter corsages are stored in the refrigerator. In her collection Inheritance of Flowers, Hoge presents the performative and spectacular aesthetic of her youth, perfectly encapsulated by the butterfly table and brightly blooming wallpaper of her 1970s bedroom, leading us to wonder about the rootedness of life built for appearances and what that means for a girl who felt "superimposed upon the world." In these exquisite poems, Hoge leans into her inheritance, learning to put down firm roots and find refuge within the homes she has created. Joy and astonishment are found, even amid pandemic lockdown, even amid the mundane, when she sets aside the artificial map of her to do list and looks to the "lay of the land / below my windows / show[ing] a gathering of violets / risen from their rhizomes."
--Ann E. Wallace, author of Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID's Long Haul and producer of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants
