Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is the most refreshing book of the year. These are poems inspired by plants and flowers, but we are far from “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!”. An apothecary and an alchemist, Legris shows us a dense and mysterious garden of verse, arranged in carefully cultivated harmonies: “Drip a drop in an ear to diminish an ache.” Everyone should tiptoe in: there’s nothing around quite like it.

Sensuous, brainy and cardiovascular, Garden Physic is a cutting-edge ode to plants, teeming with human knowledge and natural mystery, accompanied by gem-like illustrations by the poet.

An impressive achievement—one facilitated by the poet’s singular, “wild-thoughted” vocabulary.

This is gardening on the level of Hecate or Baba Yaga: sorcerous, numinous, cunningly manipulating the chemical elements of life and death. And in keeping with this magic, Legris’s love for language plays unbounded among the joys of the botanical lexicon.

Legris, an experimental poet from the Canadian Midwest, here evokes the landscape through thickets of profuse language.

Using florid language and poetic verse, Garden Physic revels in the pleasures of nature, weather and color — and how the garden functions as a place of growth and healing.

Garden Physic is the author’s best book in a so-far stellar career.

Over the past twenty years, Canadian poet Sylvia Legris has quietly built a remarkable, multilayered body of work worthy of deep exploration and appreciation. An artist of relentless evolution and experimentation, Legris’s poetics compress and expand, infusing elements of dance, botany, and human machinery into new structures and imagery that is at once wildly imaginative and deeply visceral.

For Legris, the sum of life is not necessarily sense, story, or quanta but is also a strange summation of unknowing.

Legris’s work crackles with exuberant wackiness