Join Katie Holten and Amy Franceschini, in conversation with Robert Sullivan: The Language of Trees

 

A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2023

Please join us for what promises to be a wonderful Sunday afternoon as Katie HoltenAmy Franceschini, and Robert Sullivan discuss her beautiful new book, The Language of Trees.

“A masterpiece. Katie Holten's tree alphabet is a gift to the printed world.”—Max Porter, author of Grief is a Thing with Feathers

Inspired by forests, trees, leaves, roots, and seeds, The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape invites readers to discover an unexpected and imaginative language to better read and write the natural world around us and reclaim our relationship with it. In this gorgeously illustrated and deeply thoughtful collection, Katie Holten gifts readers her tree alphabet and uses it to translate masterfully and illuminate beloved lost and new, original writing in praise of the natural world. With an introduction from Ross Gay, and featuring writings from over fifty contributors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, James Gleick, Elizabeth Kolbert, Plato, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Holten illustrates each selection with an abiding love and reverence for the magic of trees. She guides readers on a journey from creation myths and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500-year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to the language of fossil poetry, unearthing a new way to see the natural beauty all around us and an urgent reminder of what could happen if we allow it to slip away.

The Language of Trees considers our relationship with literature and landscape, resulting in an astonishing fusion of storytelling and art and a deeply beautiful celebration of trees through the ages.

 

Amy Franceschini is an artist and designer whose work facilitates encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the "certainties" of a given time or place where a work is situated. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between "humans" and "nature". Her projects reveal the history and currents of contradictions related to this divide by challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to "hunt" and "gather". Using this as a starting point, she creates relational objects that invoke action and inquiry; not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Event date: 
Sunday, April 23, 2023 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Event address: 
Head House Books
619 South 2nd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape By Katie Holten, Ross Gay (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Katie Holten, Ross Gay (Introduction by)
$29.95
Email or call for price
ISBN: 9781953534682
Published: Tin House Books - April 4th, 2023