Crushed Wild Mint

By Jess Housty

Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet's motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing--held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.

Housty's poems are textural--blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow--and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader's whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors' bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty's exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community.

Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889714509
• ISBN13: 9780889714502
• Release Date: April 2024
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

I didn't want to give Crushed Wild Mint back to the library.

I didn't want to give Crushed Wild Mint back to the library. I want to read it over and over. To soak in each poem slowly and with intent. To savor it. Grief and blood and our deep kinship with the earth. For people who enjoyed the stories in Braiding Sweetgrass and who also like poetry. Highly recommended.