A r b o r i s m of B r a n c h i n g
Sonnets for Post-Divorce Photosynthesis
Riley Danvers
N O W O U T F R O M A R T E I D O L I A P R E S S
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Riley Danvers’s writing is so powerful that, in the destruction of the sonnet, a marriage, institutions with so many written and insidious strictures, she creates new language/rituals to celebrate her becoming bramble, thistle, thorn./ No longer only woman. Now also tree./Now also cluster, grove, orchard of wild resonance. Each poem resonates with the power of nature, the cosmic feminine, and her own ecstatic flourishing. Read these poems out loud, outdoors under the stars, in the trees, and you will feel coniferous…rooted…[you will feel yourself] reaching towards blue skies and magnolia blossoms.
—Kate Gray, poet & writer
Ecological and botanical in both imagery and ontology, Riley Danvers’s Arborism of Branching—a philosophy almost, though not quite, an Aphorism of Branching, transforms the speaker’s pain and divorce into something arboreal, magical, and mythical. The book’s emotional and corporeal engine is not the rupture itself but the lingering ache of imagining how another consciousness might have witnessed it. Though it confronts death, of a relationship, and of other forms of ending, Danvers’s poetry remains luminously verdant and alive, interweaving nature and human experience into lucid, resonant braids that honor the living world with uncommon depth.
—VI KHI NAO, writer & interdisciplinary artist
Dedicated to :
Anyone who has ever had to endure abuse,
had to walk away from abuse,
had to heal from abuse at the hands
of someone who claimed to love them.Remember :
You are a wilderness,
a forest,
a place of magic.
Riley Danvers is a bisexual, nonbinary, and disabled poet living in Portland, Oregon. Their poetry has been published in Z Publishing House, Silkworm, Clackamas Literary Review, Other Worldly Women Press, among others. Riley graduated with their M.F.A. in Poetry from Willamette University in 2021, and completed their M.A. in Literature from Mercy College in 2023. They just completed an M.S. in Professional Writing from NYU. Their debut book of poetry, Even the Air, Too Heavy, was published by First Matter Press in 2022. Their chapbook, This Is How I, is now out from Bottlecap Press.