Sundress Publications announces that pre-orders are now open for Kimberly Ann Priest’s Floralia, a stunning collection that captures the specter that haunts survivors of assault through part poetry, part radio show, and part botany lesson.
Priest skilfully uses the natural world—in particular, flowers—as a vehicle to explore traumatic dissociation from the self. Butterflies flutter, succulents burst forth in laughter, and amaranth is pondered as both an herb and a weed in gestures to raw violence both subtle and blunt. The radio show’s protagonist converses with her own ghost, navigating the spectacle of her assault and the desire for it to be both witnessed and suppressed. I want you to notice the track marks on my arms is the plea in “Tell me you are listening”—another speaker seeking both witness and relief, again accenting the contradictory needs and desires of trauma. Floralia holds agony and mundanity in parallel, interrogating the performance of pain and its social response, whether from therapists, partners, the media—even you, the reader. Yet inside this dialectic tension between visibility and protection, Floralia manages to hope, with the possibility of healing and growth promised in a future spring’s full and fragrant bloom.
Katie Manning, editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review, writes “with Floralia, Kimberly Ann Priest takes readers into the aftermath of sexual abuse—the flashes of memory, the gaps, the therapy, the survivor’s strange relationship with her family and her own body. Using flowers as both metaphor and a source of grounding, these poems brilliantly capture thoughts and experiences that are almost impossible to put into words. ‘Tell me you are listening,’ she says. Yes, I’m listening. Everyone needs to read this book.”
Kimberly Ann Priest is a writer and visual artist whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry. She is the author of four full-length books of poetry and an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University. Her poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, and Prairie Schooner.
