Katie Holten: About Trees

Robert MacFarlane writes “There is no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages.” In ‘About Trees’, Katie Holten invites us to enter some of these forests. She has created a Tree Alphabet and used it to translate a compendium of well known, loved, lost and new writing. She takes readers on a journey from ‘primeval atoms’ 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 Emerson’s language of fossil poetry, unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way.

‘About Trees’ is the first book in Broken Dimanche Press’s series: Parapoetics – a Literature beyond the Human. Recognizing a crisis of representation as our species adapts to life in the Anthropocene, ‘About Trees’ considers our relationship with language, landscape, and perception.

The result is an astonishing fusion of storytelling and art, which celebrates trees and our understanding of them, their past and their future, their potential and their ubiquity. It is a book to leaf through, again and again.