A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito—part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy.  Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito’s beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one’s life through the logic of flora. Ito’s graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.

Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize Introducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada. The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society. Ito has been described as a "shaman of poetry" because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera-part poetry, part prose, part epic-a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the "thorns" of human suffering.