Plant Daddy

Rigdon's Plant Daddy, like the flora it venerates, is alive in generative possibilities. Each poem creates new worlds in strange and small places—places that break us, that make us whole, that bring us together until our roots intertwine. You will relish this collection and its love for sounds, for color, for life, for memory and love evoked and turned into a natural resistance, no need for chemicals.

With dazzling language, the poems in Plant Daddy are rooted in a rich soil that allows for a profoundly revealing exploration of identity, grief, mental illness, and addiction. Rigdon knows "there is a power in the naming of things," and that "Every Last One Wants / to be known." Throughout its five discreet yet connected sections, we see a journey of personal growth mirrored in the plants so fiercely described. Just as we inhabit our own bodies, each plant lives alone in its own container while remaining connected to the home and the people who live there and reaches always out toward the light. We learn what it means to embrace one's nonbinary and trans identity in a world that, if it cannot erase your existence, will enact laws to do just that. At times, the poems in Plant Daddy reminded me, in the best way possible, of how I felt when I first read Theodore Roethke's greenhouse poems in The Lost Son, one of my favorite poetry sequences. Read Plant Daddy if you want a guidebook from someone who has experienced the "sudden and momentary relief of / meeting / myself," while learning to thrive just as they are, and remember, "No one is lost. / No one is ever lost." and we all "deserve more than" our "heart gives permission to ask—

Renée Rigdon writes like a hedge witch. Plant Daddy is the kind of collection that upon reading the first poem makes you want to put your hands in some soil and take a long, healing breath. I highly recommend this gorgeous, meditative, and grounding collection.