Introduction

I first read The Wild Iris in 2017 on the recommendation of my friend Jane, which began an ongoing love of Louise Glück's work. When I first read the book, I was entranced and also confused. I was not then and am barely now a gardener, and while I have spent much of my life outdoors -- hiking, camping, canoeing, etc. -- I had never internalized the names of the plants around me. Thus, in reading the poems, my images were confused. I could not keep straight clematis from chicory. I still loved the book: There is so much that comes through without any botanical knowledge at all. Yet, I felt that the resonance of the book might be greater if I knew just a little more about what all these proper nouns were referencing, if I could picture them clearly.

In 2020, I reread The Wild Iris in full as part of a book club with my friend Cay. Around this same time, Cay and her friend Mathilde completed their zine, Burnout, on academic travel. In the conjunction of these two things -- feeling again my lack of knowledge and seeing a zine happen in real time -- the idea for this botanical companion to The Wild Iris was born.

The intended purpose of this zine is to serve as a companion to readers of The Wild Iris that do not have extensive knowledge of the plants woven through the text. The zine provides an image of and some basic information about every plant that is mentioned in the book, organized in the same sequence that they appear in the poems and duplicated where there are references to the same plant across multiple poems. I have worked to find images that show the plant in at least some context, though I have not always been successful. The information that I have chosen to present alongside the image is relatively sparse, and chosen to reflect some of the knowledge that a gardener might use in growing the plants. I have not offered any kind of linking interpretation between the characteristics of the plants and their function in the poems. This is left to the reader.

I want to thank Jane, Eric, Cay, and many others for advice and encouragement throughout this project.