Flowers in the Garden

Flowers in the Garden is a chapbook of hybrid poetry and prose that explores the sacred conversation between pain, healing, and the natural world. Through the personification of medicinal plants, both gentle flowers and so-called weeds, this collection leads readers through a metaphorical garden that mirrors the emotional journey from vulnerability to sovereignty.

Each poem gives voice to a plant traditionally used for healing, such as poppy, chamomile, motherwort, and yarrow. These are not textbook facts in poetry, but in emotion and raw humanity. Their stories unfold across a spectrum of tenderness, grief, boundary-setting, and eventual reclamation of self. Between them, short interlude poems featuring darker figures like bindweed, burdock, nightshade, and nettle serve as transitional waypoints, confronting the reader with the undercurrents of trauma, survival, and defense that often go unspoken.

Told in hybrid form that resists convention, Flowers in the Garden merges poetic imagery with fragmented prose to reflect the complexity of emotional growth. It is not a linear path, nor a tidy one, but it is honest. The writing invites the reader to engage deeply with the world around them and within them, imagining each plant not as an object, but as a being with voice, memory, and medicine.

Written for those in the process of becoming, of unraveling, of re-rooting, this chapbook encourages the reader to listen to their environment differently. To notice. To slow down. To ask what the land knows that we have forgotten.

Flowers in the Garden is a deeply personal work by an independent author, published through Thistle & Thread Press, a small press dedicated to honoring the voices that grow outside the mainstream. It is a celebration of quiet strength, natural wisdom, and the resilience that takes root when no one is watching.