Kuppers carefully inhabits that electric moment where the two meet, whether she is holding a stick of rhubarb or dreaming of a dragonfly's "bristle foot pad hair." Given that we are all, even in quarantine, in an endless interaction with the world outside of us, these are the kinds of moments to learn to live in.
~Dennis James Sweeney
Gut Botany weaves disability, ecological, somatic, and performance poetry. Throughout, diverse human and more-than-human bodies touch with tenderness, violence, joy, and pain. Kuppers tries to be open to ‘the all’ and how all her senses ‘layer and story’ so she can write––‘palm tingling’––toward healing, sanctuary, and love.
~Craig Santos Perez
Kuppers’s writing is additive, even multiplicative, rather than subtractive or divisive. The book explores myriad forms violence, but also makes room for bodies touching other bodies in wonder and in love.
~Camille Dungy
Petra Kuppers's new collection is a wonder. [. . .] At turns beautiful and provocative, Gut Botany is a tonic against loneliness.
~Addie Hopes
This collection of poems does more than just suggest a poetics of disability, it pushes all of us engaging in disability studies—students, teachers, activists, and artists—to feel more critically through our own physical movement in, and embodied relationships to the spaces we inhabit.
~Jose Miguel Esteban
In this beautifully designed book of experimental and surrealist poems, a reader is both tantalized and tortured as the disabled speaker uses language to revel in a lover's affection and eroticism.
~Kimberly Ann Priest
The poems in Gut Botany stiffen moods. They make their meaning out of fleeting feelings that suddenly sit up and hold their forms. There’s pleasure to be taken in the examination this makes possible, but there is danger, too.
~Ezra Dan Feldman
Kuppers’ intentionality has remained strong but her lyric gifts have increased with time. Culture Gut Botany yourself and apprehend the growth.
~Shane Neilson
In these poems Petra Kuppers slides words into unexpected spaces following rivers of conscious memories and neural networks of unconscious motions. Places become political and politics become visceral. She weaves a way of being in the world with the forces that oppose it and edges of reality and sensation that serve to feed it. Reading these poems we find light, breezes, and resilience.
~Margaret Noodin, Author of Weweni (Wayne State University Press, 2015)
Through a bold new empiricism—attentions drawn to surfaces, new ways to touch and understand touching, and thus new depths of healing—the human/more-than-human relation is rewritten. Gut Botany reveals a geospatial philosophy of radical connectedness.
~Linda Russo, Author of Participant
Gut Botany is a capacious assay of corporeal life-support systems. A lingual choreography of interrelation and interdependence forms a generative phenomenology where every point of contact matters. Gendered, sexual, ableist, ecological, and colonial-settler violence is met with fierce and tender resistance. By disarming all forms of tyranny and extractivism, sustainability is possible. This is a work of immense transformative capacity. I am moved by the sheer responsiveness and receptivity that is involved when blooming out of line as a gender non-conforming nebula. Find sustenance in this generous resource of movement and change.
~Brenda Iijima, Author of Remembering Animals
Kuppers's surreal and experimental poetry shows how all ecologies are sentient bloomings of contact. Language flows like water, shimmers like a series of moons overhead, and Gut Botany invites us: 'Just speak, walk with me, close the loop.'
~Lucien Darjeun Meadows
