With illustrations by Nikhil Das.
Published 2022. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95. Only for sale in the UK, Ireland and Australia.
ISBN 9781848618251 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Even as she was searching for people who had wanted to live like a tree, a quest recorded in her book How I Became a Tree
, Sumana Roy was simultaneously writing poems to imagine the opposite: How might it feel for plants to live social lives as humans? In V.I.P
, ‘plant’ replaces ‘people’ to become Very Important Plant
. In this new cosmology, leaves and fruits and roots are seen as perhaps they have never been before – whether flowers can be repaired or trees have insurance policies; the invisible scaffolding of water in onion and the jackfruit as the Buddha’s head, the papaya as Trojan horse and the ‘war-veteran fine fuzz’ of peaches, the ‘shape of ceremony’ of apples and the cosmopolitanism of the forest; how we want affection to be boneless and why the taste of light might be bitter; or whether God might be a vegetable…
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