A r b o r i s m 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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In this episode, we talk with poet and author Riley Danvers about writing, identity, and Riley’s new poetry collection, Arborism of Branching: Sonnets for Post-Divorce Photosynthesis. Riley shares how reading and nature inspire their work, beginning with a childhood love of haiku, and explains how the book’s sonnets chronicle a year after leaving an abusive marriage, moving through seasons as metaphors for shedding, searching, and self-actualization. We discuss the vulnerability of writing trauma, the importance of grounding through reading and community, and poetry recommendations. Riley urges artists to create as an act of resistance, sharing work widely.
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
Your poetry collection, A r b o r i s m of B r a n c h i n g : Sonnets for Post-Divorce Photosynthesiswas just released by Arteidolia Press. Your title is very intriguing and opens up so many avenues of thought. I’m curious what it means to you and how would you like readers to interpret it?
Read the full interview with Riley Danvers →
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.