The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape
About the book
Author: Katie Holten
Publisher: Tin House
More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.
Buy and support indie bookstores (+ I earn a small commission):
Bookshop.org (print)
My Review
This book is drop-dead gorgeous and you simply must purchase yourself a physical copy. Katie Holten has used illustrations of different species of trees to create an alphabet; apple for A, cedar for C, etc. Then she collected a bunch of short essays, poems, and other pieces on nature and our relationship to the earth and transcribed every single one using this alphabet. She printed each resulting “forest” alongside its corresponding essay, resulting in an act of translation truly unlike anything else I’ve seen.
Most of the pieces in this book are only a couple of pages long, so it’s definitely one to and read a little at a time and savor over many, many days (at least a week; a month might be even better). But if you do that — don’t rush it — you will walk away moved and inspired.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Ecoanxiety