In Jasmine Reid’s poems, I find nature’s innate life transcribed as idiolect for the speaker’s body, desire, and acts of relating to another (betrothed, lover, the erotic self). Whatever each flower allows of its anatomy awakens and allows the speaker the same awakening, an obeisance to simply being, and in being, learning how eros is natural to relating. From the “slick, hairy, orchideus opening” to the petal sense in the lines of “‘beautiful,’ i am / in her mouth-touch, i am / resuscitated light,” I am enamored of this intimacy, this privacy made public, much like every blossom’s unfolding, dew-touch, and wilt is a public practice. What I learned from Reid is how a body can transcend its limitations via analogous rendering of stalk to leg, petal to lip, photosynthesis to awakening. Like the character Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, who learns what sexual attraction and desire are while watching a “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom,” so does Reid find in the sanctum of self a litany celebrating what is possible when we surrender to the greenhouse and play. It is an absolute celebration to read these poems of life, light, and garden.
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