books · non-fiction · Rosa Campbell
NON-FICTION
Pothos
Subtitle
Rosa Campbell
£10.99
£14.00
RRP £12.00
Pages · Size · ISBN · Stock
Epipremnum aureum, devil's ivy, or (somewhat erroneously) pothos is not special. It is not symbolically useful, it is not rare, it is not hard to grow or care for. But in the aftermath of unexpected death, an impossible-to-kill houseplant might have something to say about keeping going.
In Pothos, Campbell traces a polyvocal narrative of loss, absent presence, and queer homemaking through a poetics of attention and an engagement with texts, art, music, and the occasional hologram. Hovering somewhere between memoir, prose poetry and essay, Pothos examines the condition of being alternately infuriated, bored, and overwhelmed by grief - its mutability, its opacity, its refusals. It is a raw and nebulous exploration of mourning, care and domesticity, and the way in which the small background sentience of plants can (maybe) tell us something about our own growth.
Cover illustration by Rosie Robertson, see more of Rosie's wonderful work here
PRAISE FOR POTHOS
Pothos offers an extraordinarily rich and affecting account of grief, and of how it alters the experiences of love, art, plantlife, technology, friendship, food, illness, protest and crisis. This is a gorgeously messy, passionate book, thrown into disarray by personal loss, and also by the catastrophes of recent history, 'timestamps' of which can be found 'right there singing in the metadata'. Like Frank O'Hara, one…
- Oli Hazzard, Lorem Ipsum
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosa Campbell is a writer & academic living in Edinburgh. She teaches modern & contemporary literature at the University of St Andrews, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford Poetry, fourteen poems, Ambit, Gutter, Perverse, SPAM and elsewhere. Pothos is her first book.
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