how to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology? No quaint, no dainty, no winsome. This smells good, that smells bad, my hands rank with manure. This at least is pure. What is a plant in language? Something like a 'morose root', 'cream cinquefoil', or 'bohemian and sozzled with nostalgia'? In Garden Physic, Sylvia Legris's glinting studies on flora - mariner's root, throatwort, wild rocket, cuckoo point - create an abundant and fluorescent vegetal mesh. Combining the histories of botanical manuscripts and pharmacopeias with imagined letters between garden designers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and playful illustrations throughout, Legris creates an idiosyncratic botanical glossolalia for her meanderings through the physical space of the garden. These luscious poems are a testament to the imbricated human relationship to plants; a radical defence of how we can utilize our ancient symbiosis with living greenery in order to live, heal, and nourish.

This boxed set of the first twelve collections in the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series contains:

Osama Alomar's Fullbood Arabian H. D.'s Vale Ave Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blast Cries Laughter Forrest Gander's Eiko & Koma Oliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a Streetcar Susan Howe's Sorting Facts, or 19 Ways of Looking at Chris Marker Sylvia Legris's Pneumatic Antiphonal Bernadette Mayer's The Helens of Troy, New York Dunya Mikhail's 15 Iraqi Poets Alejandra Pizarnik's A Musical Hell Nathaniel Tarn's The Beautiful Contradictions Lydia Davis & Eliot Weinberger's Two American Scenes

In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy. Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan's On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy's wonders: "Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen."

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlets" series, Pneumatic Antiphonal is a fun, humming, bio-physiological word-whizzing flight into birdsong penned by young Canadian poet, Sylvia Legris - her first publication in the U.S. An excerpt: The theory of corpuscular flight is the cardinal premise of red birds carrying song-particles carrying oxygen. Erythrocytic. Sticky. Five quarts of migration.