Tree Talks: Southern Arizona

Poetry. Photography. Art. Wendy Burk's TREE TALKS: SOUTHERN ARIZONA contains eight interviews with Southern Arizona trees. Documentation and methods join and interweave these entirely readable soundscapes. As the poet explains in the Introduction:

"I came to this study as a way to consider ethics, environment, politics, communication, and failure to communicate. In carrying out the work, I asked myself how the underlying privileges and assumptions of my writing are complicit with the dominant culture's drive to dominate, through warfare, science, or art. The poems in TREE TALKS: SOUTHERN ARIZONA take those assumptions to what I hope is a useful extreme."

"These are the most usefully extreme interviews I have read in a long time. The interviewee marks its presence in utter silence, with phoneme–free diacritics, while the sounds all around make their own visual noise. In a world cluttered with language, these poems clear a listening space, free of borders, where we can tune in to the urgent unspoken." —Eleni Sikelianos

"In TREE TALKS: Southern Arizona, Wendy Burk 'interviews' eight different trees that reside in various forest and urban habitats. The poet asks questions about their experiences, feelings, memories, perceptions, fears, hopes, and dreams. This wonder transforms into magic through Burk's innovative transcriptions, in which a visual and aural eco–poetry interweaves natural, human, animal, and technological soundscapes. In our era of global deforestation, this book is a timely and profound reminder that we must talk to trees and listen, deeply, to their sentience." —Craig Santos Perez