All posts tagged: Jessica J. Lee

Holiday Reads 2024

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
 
Exploring migration from the perspective of plants; mystical historical fiction that will transport you from New England to Haiti; and one woman’s chance to do life over again.
 
We revisited our community’s favorite reads from throughout the year and compiled a list of memoirs, essay collections, novels, and creative nonfiction works to inspire a diverse holiday reading list, or kick off your reading plans for the new year. All of these titles were originally highlighted in our “What We’re Reading” and Book Reviews columns, and we think they deserve a second spotlight. Read on for recommendations from the Phoenix desert, the Indian subcontinent, the seaside, and more.
 
 
cover of you get what you pay for
 
Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For
 
A poetic memoir-in-essays about Parker’s struggle to live freely amid the omnipresent legacy of enslavement in America. Beginning with her childhood as the only Black girl in a conservative, religious town, Parker moves between wide-ranging topics—including everything from cop killings, to plantation tours, to therapy and Jay-Z—but frames it all with the motif of the slave ship.
Holiday Reads 2024
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Review: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging

By JESSICA J. LEE
Reviewed by KATIE NOAH GIBSON

The cover of Jessica J. Lee's DISPERSALS shows pink and yellow wildflower sprigs against a black background.

“These are essays written for a world in motion,” writes Jessica J. Lee in the introduction to her exquisite, haunting third book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, a collection of 14 essays examining the movement—voluntary, forced and accidental—of people and plants across landscapes. Writing in a time of massive global migration, and having experienced several recent upheavals in her own life (including motherhood and the COVID-19 pandemic), Lee considers terms like rooted and migration in light of economic structures, political power, and her own Welsh-Taiwanese-Canadian ancestry. She probes, researches, and even delights in the ways in which plants—seeds, trees, rhizomes—consistently defy human notions of borders and boundaries.

Review: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
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