Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Ars Botanica
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Iowa City
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2017102869 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017102869 |
| HEADING: | Taranto, Tim |
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| 001 | 10524114 |
| 005 | 20170808073603.0 |
| 008 | 170807n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
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| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca10928160 |
| 040 | __ |a NN |b eng |e rda |c NN |
| 100 | 1_ |a Taranto, Tim |
| 372 | __ |a Visual arts |2 lcsh |
| 373 | __ |a Iowa Writers’ Workshop |a Cornell University |2 naf |
| 374 | __ |a Artists |a Writers |a Poets |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Ars botanica, 2017: |b title page (Tim Taranto) back cover (Tim Taranto is a writer, visual artist, and poet from New York; Tim is graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) |
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Graduate of Cornell University and Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, visual artist, and poet. Little Village magazine, managing editor.
WRITINGS
Contributor to print and online publications, including Buzzfeed, FSG’s Works in Progress, Harper’s, Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Paris Review Daily, Rumpus, and Saint Ann’s Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Writer and visual artist Tim Taranto’s first book is the memoir Ars Botanica: A Field Guide, consisting of letters to an unborn child mixed with poetry, song lyrics, botanical descriptions and illustrations, thoughts on various subjects, and bits of dialogue. The child, whom he calls Catalpa, would have been the offspring of Taranto and a former girlfriend. He never names the woman, but he details their relationship and what she meant to him. She was supportive of him as he dealt with alopecia, a medical condition that caused him to lose his hair and nails, and he quickly fell in love with her, he writes. They had been together only two months when she was involved in a serious bicycle accident that left her with several broken bones. While being treated for her injuries, she learned that she was three weeks’ pregnant. A few weeks later, she had an abortion, and he stood by her in the decision. Shortly thereafter, she broke up with him, and he was stunned and saddened. The book is not an anti-abortion treatise, but it conveys Taranto’s grief at both the end of the pregnancy and the end of the relationship, and his regrets as he ponders what might have been. “I’ll never draw with you,” he writes to Catalpa. “I won’t pick wildflowers or scour the river for geodes with you. I can’t train your ear to recognize a tanger by its song. But I’ll draw for you, create for you an ars botanica depicting a world you never knew. I’ll tell you a story, too. I’ll write you, because loss does not end our relationships with the departed, it transforms them.”
Several reviewers found Ars Botanica a touching, elegiac, unusual memoir. It “reads like a carefully composed scrapbook,” related Jera Brown in the online Rebellious Magazine, adding: “It’s a field guide to a world that Taranto and his lover inhabited and that their child will never know.” Another online critic, Rumpus contributor Caro Macon, said she initially hesitated to read the book but ended up being happy she did. “I was wrong to assume this would be a guilt-ridden story about abortion,” she related. “This lovely story is really guiltless. It is stitched together with so many smiles, a fair amount of earned heartache, and lots and lots of love. It asks to be treasured through every page, and it is.” Evan Falls, writing on the Page & Spine Fiction Showcase Web site, remarked that “Taranto’s writing is born of suffering, but is about surviving and thriving in a beautiful world. He seeks to find beauty in even the most tragic moments, to find acceptance in all parts of the world, including and especially those finite ones we cannot control. Ars Botanica is lyrical, emotional, and honest: an excellent memoir.”
A Kirkus Reviews commentator called Ars Botanica an “often heart-wrenching attempt at resolving a personal struggle through art but also a sobering consideration of how things happen–or don’t.” A Publishers Weekly critic described it as “a study in letting go” and “a reminder of grief’s essential paradox”–that the more emotion we have invested in a person, the more their absence hurts. The book, observed Rebecca Foster in ForeWord, is “a reminder that something doesn’t have to last to be precious.” A contributor to the online journal Arkansas International termed it a “heart-sick, heart-healing memoir” that “honors the most fractured, unknowable parts of life.” A reviewer at the Book Riot Web site added that Ars Botanica “is beautiful and innovative and moving.” Macon, noting that someone in the book tells Taranto, “Statistically speaking, couples usually don’t make it through these sorts of things,” concluded: “It may be true that this kind of loss is hard for lovers survive, but Ars Botanica gives the reader a beautiful space to question why that is.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Taranto, Tim, Ars Botanica: A Field Guide (memoir), Curbside Splendor (Chicago, IL), 2017.
PERIODICALS
ForeWord, June 29, 2017, Rebecca Foster, review of Ars Botanica.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Ars Botanica.
Publishers Weekly, April 17, 2017, review of Ars Botanica, p. 56.
ONLINE
Arkansas International, https://www.arkint.org/ (January 14, 2018), review of Ars Botanica.
Book Riot, https://bookriot.com/ (December 11, 2017), review of Ars Botanica.
Curbside Splendor Website, http://www.curbsidesplendor.com/ (January 14, 2018), brief biography.
Page & Spine Fiction Showcase, http://pagespineficshowcase.com/ (January 14, 2018, Evan Falls, review of Ars Botanica.
Rebellious Magazine, http://rebelliousmagazine.com/ (January 14, 2018), Jera Brown, review of Ars Botanica.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (September 12, 2017), Caro Macon, “Naming Our Phantoms: Tim Taranto’s Ars Botanica.“
Tim Taranto is from Upstate New York. His work has appeared on Buzzfeed, The Rumpus, The Paris Review Daily, FSG's Works in Progress, The Iowa Review and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa where he is the managing editor of Little Village magazine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tim Taranto is a writer, visual artist, and poet from New York. His work has been featured in Buzzfeed, FSG’s Works in Progress, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and The Saint Ann’s Review. Tim is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Quoted in Sidelights: “often heart-wrenching attempt at resolving a personal struggle through art but also a sobering consideration of how things happen–or don’t.”
Taranto, Tim: ARS BOTANICA
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Taranto, Tim ARS BOTANICA Curbside Splendor (Adult Nonfiction) $14.95 7, 11 ISBN: 978-1-940430-98-0
An unusual narrative of loss that becomes both a meditation on the Earth and a benediction for one who won't be around to enjoy it.Taranto's first book is a poetic memoir steeped in beginnings and endings. The narrative is composed of a series of letters to an unborn child, whom the author addresses as Catalpa, interspersed with illustrated botanical definitions, poems, observations, song lyrics, and bursts of dialogue. This assorted correspondence with a lost child is primarily an explanation (and perhaps an apology) of how the child's conception began but was ultimately terminated. Taranto writes of how he and his girlfriend met, each helping the other work through their troubles. She loved him despite his alopecia, a medical condition that left him hairless; he stuck by her following a near-fatal bicycle accident that not only broke several bones, but, during the hospital visit, led to the realization that she was pregnant. Taranto memorializes a difficult period in his life, made all the more painful because the abortion was not inevitable. The basic reason was that the couple didn't really know each other that well, an explanation that seemed to suit her more than him. The book is not an anti-abortion tract; Taranto did not interfere with her decision and offered solace and support. But by its very nature, the story is haunted by lost possibilities. At one point, the author utters a prayer that God take him instead of the baby: "Let me be a father only in memory if she can be a mother in this life. Amen." The prayer went unanswered; the closest Taranto would get to fully realizing the fatherhood of Catalpa is through an act of memory and imagination, for which this one-way epistolary emotional scrapbook will have to suffice. An uneven, often heart-wrenching attempt at resolving a personal struggle through art but also a sobering consideration of how things happen--or don't.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Taranto, Tim: ARS BOTANICA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427325/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=110c3695. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
1 of 5 12/22/17, 10:27 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427325
2 of 5 12/22/17, 10:27 PM
Quoted in Sidelights: “a reminder that something doesn’t have to last to be precious.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Ars Botanica; A Field Guide
Rebecca Foster
ForeWord.
(June 29, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Tim Taranto; ARS BOTANICA; Curbside Splendor (Nonfiction: Autobiography & Memoir) 14.95 ISBN: 9781940430980
Byline: Rebecca Foster
Writing to one's unborn child is reasonably common; it's the starting point for Karl Ove Knausgaard's upcoming quartet, for instance. Such a project might suggest romanticized anticipation, but Little Village managing editor Tim Taranto's Ars Botanica: A Field Guide is completely different. Not only is his genre-busting volume addressed to an aborted fetus ("Catalpa"), but it intersperses short letters with narrative chapters, black-and-white photographs, and sketches of an unusual selection of flora, fauna, and fossils.
It all starts with a bicycle ride to a raptor rehabilitation center in Iowa. Taranto and his girlfriend had been together just two months, yet when a van ran her bike off the road that day, catapulting her into a tree and breaking her shoulder and collarbone, emergency-room staff discovered that she was already three weeks pregnant. This girlfriend -- who's never named, just referred to as "her" or "your mother" -- swiftly decided to terminate the pregnancy at nine weeks; to Taranto's dismay, she also ended their relationship soon thereafter.
The book is thus a dual elegy for a love affair cut short and a potential life never lived. With the letters to Catalpa and the images of natural relicts, the author is introducing this unborn child to everything it will never know: not only its parents, but also the beauty of the world. To that end, Taranto includes lots of sensory detail and many striking metaphors: "The peaks materialized in mauve clots upon the bolts of indigo and violet" of the sky, and "She's run these trails for years familiar to her as the melodies of old hymns."
Although this is by no means a simple autobiography, Taranto does document the changes in himself brought about by losing his partner and Catalpa: an autoimmune condition caused him to start losing his hair and nails, and he got more involved in Quaker meetings and developed a new spiritual awareness. This is represented in the mixture of visions and dreams that populate the book's latter half. Catalpa is like the resident ghost that haunts this peculiar memoir, a reminder that something doesn't have to last to be precious.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Foster, Rebecca. "Ars Botanica; A Field Guide." ForeWord, 29 June 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497627351/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
3 of 5 12/22/17, 10:27 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
xid=8b5d54e4. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017. Gale Document Number: GALE|A497627351
4 of 5 12/22/17, 10:27 PM
Quoted in Sidelights: “a study in letting go” and “a reminder of grief’s essential paradox”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Ars Botanica
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p56+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ars Botanica
Tim Taranto. Curbside Splendor, $14.95 trade paper (185p) ISBN 978-1-940430-98-0
Part epistolary memoir and part emotive taxonomy of significant flora and fauna, the primary endeavor of this book, Tarantos debut, is transformation: to wring from grief the shape and substance of art. In a series of letters to his and his former partner's unborn child, Taranto details love's earliest stages, disrupted by one of life's most difficult decisions. It's clear from the outset that this is a couple bound for heartbreak, but Taranto nonetheless lingers--therapeutically, perhaps--on their "blissed out era," replete with the many intimacies of a lover's universe, shared and special: "She sang me 'Unchained Melody' and I sat down in the middle of the road, feeling especially small under a canopy of our shining galaxy. " Still, despite the address to their child, the memoir reads more like a love letter to Taranto 's then partner, as a testament to the life they shared before the abortion, the future that could have been, and--at least to Taranto--the pain that brought them closer before it undid them: "What is love if not the refuge we find in another when confronted with life's suffering?" A study in letting go, even the excess of happy moments recounted in grief serve as a reminder of grief's essential paradox: "The more I feel your presence, the more acute your absence is; the more of you I've got, the more of you I've lost." (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ars Botanica." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 56+. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820818/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=35c3e483. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820818
Quoted in Sidelights: “I was wrong to assume this would be a guilt-ridden story about abortion,” she related. “This lovely story is really guiltless. It is stitched together with so many smiles, a fair amount of earned heartache, and lots and lots of love. It asks to be treasured through every page, and it is.”
“It may be true that this kind of loss is hard for lovers survive, but Ars Botanica gives the reader a beautiful space to question why that is.”
Naming Our Phantoms: Tim Taranto’s Ars Botanica
Reviewed By Caro Macon
September 12th, 2017
I was on a cold, sunny bench when a friend told me about Tim Taranto’s debut memoir, Ars Botanica. Looking back, I can’t remember if she told me by phone or in-person. What I do know is I was about seven weeks pregnant, stuck in that time when I was sure I was pregnant but it was too soon to tell anyone. Stuck in that time between winter and spring. I was exhausted. Taranto describes these early weeks perfectly. He says, “After we knew for certain she was pregnant, her morning sickness took on the characteristics of a horrible flu.”
When that friend told me about Ars Botanica, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. The pitch is difficult: a man recounts his love for his unnamed ex-girlfriend through letters to their unborn child. But I want to pause here and breathe into this synopsis. It is true, yes, the story is as described. But the weariness I felt hearing it the first time was off-base. I was wrong to assume this would be a guilt-ridden story about abortion. This lovely story is really guiltless. It is stitched together with so many smiles, a fair amount of earned heartache, and lots and lots of love. It asks to be treasured through every page, and it is.
This is clear to me from the very second page, where Taranto says, “What’s the difference between living and thriving? Before I met her I was living.” Before her, he loved to limbo, study dinosaurs, and grade papers in the sauna. But when he met her, he was “filled with a warm repose, how a houseplant must feel when moved to a sunny sill.” Throughout the narrative, I fall in love with her, too.
She is outdoorsy and adventurous. She’s rooted in nature, but loves Lord of the Rings and baking pies. She is his “Trap Queen.” She laughs heartily and plays the harmonica. Very early in her pregnancy, before she even realizes her period is late, she gets into a gnarly bicycle accident that shatters her collarbone. The images of her in the sling are so vulnerable, goofy, sad.
When I reflect on the early days of my pregnancy, I recount certain moments obsessively like Taranto does. For me, one is sitting on a park bench. Remembering the weather but not if I was alone. For him, one moment is when she flies off the bike and into the dirt. Other moments include her warmth, her glow, and her slow, intimate pace. He writes,
…the ultrasound technician told her your exact age. “Nine weeks, six days,” she said. We scrolled back through the photos on my phone: cartoons we’d drawn, walks we’d taken in the prairie through sunflower and bee balm, fruits and fungi we’d foraged, meals cooked, sunsets viewed, fireworks, a video of a snail crawling over her hand.
To keep the memoir from losing itself in these images, Taranto cuts through the more emotional sentiments with direct information. Early on, he hints at a thesis for the book:
When she communicated her desire to terminate the pregnancy, I was with her, it was what I wanted, too. When she communicated her desire to terminate the relationship, I pulled my hat over my eyes and sank into the sofa.
He spends the majority of the next pages citing evidence for these claims, and he does so convincingly through curated episodes of their romance.
There is something this narrative does really well, and it is that it doesn’t make a case for or against abortion. It doesn’t really try to, as it tracks a very specific account of an experience. It shares specific thoughts about a specific relationship. In the end, I am not left with an agenda, but I am left with some things to consider.
In the story, a close friend of the couple’s announces she is pregnant, and she is just about as far along as the central woman. There is, justifiably, some psychological spin-out over this. But as I read this, I consider how an early ultrasound will show a woman who wants to have a baby just that: a baby. The same ultrasound can show a different woman, one who does not want to have a baby, an undeveloped group of cells. A lima bean, as put in Ars Botanica. One woman’s perception is based in excitement. The other’s is based in dismay. The two women are looking at a similar structure and feeling completely different things. Both women are right.
There is no way to classify a response to pregnancy. It is what it is, which is why people find consolation in naming their phantoms. In this case, the phantom is named Catalpa.
The beauty of taxonomy literally staples the book together. On one side, an illustrative imprint of a plant, fossil, or photograph. On the other, a title of the species, accompanied by a small lyric, poem, or excerpt. The genre is hybrid in this way, making the book a “field guide to loss.” At times, the book feels like a pamphlet in a nature preserve, a notebook to write impressions of different species. Taxonomy is also significant to the couple’s relationship. Together, they collect and classify fossils and plants. To my delight, the impressions are already written for me. The structure gives a good workout: a chance to ruminate on the emotional and learn about the literal.
The structure is also successful in giving a childlike pleasure to information and subjects that may otherwise be daunting. The book’s layout isn’t alone in this, however. Taranto’s delivery throughout is totally digestible and relatable. Part of the irresistibility I mention is his forthright self-deprecation, without seeming needy. He’s not someone to feel sorry for, but he is someone to want more from.
The story is easy to tear through. One may have to remind herself that white space in the pages is not a cue to go faster, but maybe a means to slow down and pause.
In addition to depictions of their relationship, Taranto is honest and delicate when describing his own body. He discusses his alopecia. The physicality of it, as well as the experience of having it. He is blunt about what people say and how he responds. He says, “A second-grade student told me she liked me better when I had eyebrows. I told her I liked me better then, too.”
The melancholic frankness of these descriptions makes his connection with his former lover even more special. He rarely wears a hat around her. Sometimes he thinks his hair will grow in because of her. While reading, I couldn’t help but wonder what she thinks of this book, and how her own memoir would add to the narrative. At the relationship’s end, I miss their love, but I miss it in an understanding and forgiving way. As someone in the book says, “Statistically speaking, couples usually don’t make it through these sorts of things.”
It may be true that this kind of loss is hard for lovers survive, but Ars Botanica gives the reader a beautiful space to question why that is.
Qupted in Sidelights: “reads like a carefully composed scrapbook,” related Jera Brown in the online Rebellious Magazine, adding: “It’s a field guide to a world that Taranto and his lover inhabited and that their child will never know.”
'Ars Botanica: A Field Guide' to Nature, Love & Loss
Tim Taranto, author of Ars Botanica
Jera Brown
Tim Taranto’s “Ars Botanica: A Field Guide” is an epistolary memoir using letters written to his unborn child. The book tells the story of Taranto’s relationship with his lover, the blossoming and loss of their relationship, alongside the loss of their aborted child.
Catch Taranto speaking about his new book with Chicago author Suzanne Scanlon at Women and Children First this Friday, July 21, at 7:30 p.m.
The memoir reads like a carefully composed scrapbook; the narrative is interspersed with sketches and notes on the pieces of the natural world that were important to the couple, along with bits of dialogue, song lyrics and poems. It’s a field guide to a world that Taranto and his lover inhabited and that their child will never know. Taranto explains:
“I’ll never draw with you. I won’t pick wildflowers or scour the river for geodes with you. I can’t train your ear to recognize a tanger by its song. But I’ll draw for you, create for you an ars botanica depicting a world you never knew. I’ll tell you a story, too. I’ll write you, because loss does not end our relationships with the departed, it transforms them.”
“Ars Botanica” depicts the joy of falling in love using the perspective of a quiet, settled grief, at once willing to acknowledge the beauty of what was lost while holding onto the pain of losing it.
“‘I don’t think I love you, I feel I love you,’ I said. ‘Which is it.’
‘I’m just being crazy.’ she said.
‘You’re not crazy at all. You’re like the one non-crazy person in my life.’
‘Can you pick me up?’ she asked.
‘Like how?’
‘Like pick me up and hold me?’
I can’t be sure that I am not, at this moment, still holding her.
Taranto’s world is a bit magical; he’s a likable narrator who takes pictures of flowers and woolly worms to send to his lover, and he knows the history and myths of the natural world around him. I recommend this book to any lover of gorgeous prose, lovers of nature, and especially to those who don’t flinch away from a close inspection of love and its inevitable counterpart: loss.
Quoted in Sidelights: “heart-sick, heart-healing memoir” that “honors the most fractured, unknowable parts of life.”
Ars Botanica, By Tim TaRANTO
Tim Taranto’s heart-sick, heart-healing memoir Ars Botanica invites us into pages where grief and love are pressed and dried like wildflowers. Part epistolary and part field book, the memoir is a space for Taranto to chronicle a specific period of time in his life, beginning with his diagnosis of alopecia and rediscovery of sense of self. The book centers around a lost love, layering both the sunlit romance of the early days and the mourning of break-up with equal reverence. The catalyst for both the book and the end of the relationship is a terminated pregnancy, which Taranto writes to as “Catalpa,” grieving what could have been while creating joy around the worthiness of living in love.
Subject matter so tense could easily become emotionally burdened, but Taranto allows the reader generous breath with descriptions of plants and mushrooms discovered, teas brewed, flowers observed. Furthermore, Taranto’s letters lead him to gentle meditations on art and religion, friendship and mental wellness, as he explores Iowa and travels away. Late in the book, he muses, “The experience of having someone understand you, to see the reflections of your hopes in another, to bear witness to the bright pith of another’s being, those are the events in nature that can neither be heightened or diminished through words.” This willingness to admit limitations and to try anyway is exactly what makes Ars Botanica so compelling. Taranto’s prose honors the most fractured, unknowable parts of life.
Curbside Splendor.
Quoted in Sidelights: “is beautiful and innovative and moving.”
Ars Botanica by Tim Taranto
This is mixed-genre writing as its best: it’s made up of letters written to, as Karen Russell puts it in her blurb for the book, “a phantom addressee” and contains illustrations created by the author. It’s nature writing, memoir, poetry, and art. It’s a book about grief and endings and also about the Iowa landscape where Taranto lives. The book is beautiful and innovative and moving.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Taranto’s writing is born of suffering, but is about surviving and thriving in a beautiful world. He seeks to find beauty in even the most tragic moments, to find acceptance in all parts of the world, including and especially those finite ones we cannot control. Ars Botanica is lyrical, emotional, and honest: an excellent memoir.”
Ars Amatoria: A Review of Tim Taranto’s Ars Botanica ~ Evan Falls
6/16/2017 1 Comment
Picture
I was sitting in the far corner of the Winter Garden, surrounded by stone and cold trees, when I re-read this opening sentence: “Dear Catalpa, it’s twelve below out, and I’ve got dead flowers on my kitchen table.”
So opens Ars Botanica, a memoir by Tim Taranto revolving around a series of letters addressed to his unborn, aborted daughter. Like other masterful writers, Taranto establishes an entire roadmap for the story ahead in the first sentence: the opening line addresses “Catalpa,” the botanical name for the daughter he would have had, then goes on to paint a picture of season, death, domestic life, and nature. Reading these words, sitting in such a beautiful space, I felt a synchronicity. This book encountered me in a time of need and stuck in a way I hope it will for many other readers. In his words, Taranto captures all the contradictive beauty of the nature and life he describes: Ars Botanica is structured but eclectic, brutal, beautiful, gut-wrenchingly sad, and brimming with hope.
Though Botanica is written primarily as a series of letters, the memoir also features chapters, poetry, and flash-sections, which function essentially as field notes. These subsections of the book are titled with a plant, fossil, or artifact and paired with its Latin origin name. This style is refreshing, and lends itself to an overall tone of curiosity and discovery. Ars Botanica (“botanical art” in Latin) makes an interesting statement in its structure alone: for an art like botany, where plants are studied in a consistent attempt to classify, define, and categorize them, we sure do have a hard time keeping nature in order. What are plants if not symbols of life? Taranto’s narrator writes in an effort to maintain some sort of control over his life after the loss of his daughter and her mother- who withdrew from her relationship with Taranto post-abortion- to make sense of his grief, and yet the beauty of this work comes through its defiance of categorization.
Brutality and beauty burst out of these scattered and unexpected moments. Taranto’s language is flowery in that it is vivid, but his voice is concise and honest. He tells the story of his life with his girlfriend, essentially a ghost story told about a lost mother to his dead daughter, but even as he describes how the relationship fell apart, he expresses tenderness and intimacy just like any story of how two lovers met. “Like every good thing I possibly see,” Taranto writes, “I’ll see it once for her, and another time for me.” And the reader sees what he sees, too. Through nature, weather, and the passage of time, he charts the course of a marriage not in law but in experience and love. So much of his life is almost there: a girlfriend who is almost a wife, a corpse who is almost a daughter. What works here, and avoids being preachy or sentimental, is that Taranto’s profound thoughts are born of quiet, human moments. After her procedure, Taranto’s girlfriend asks him to pick her up and hold her. He writes to Catalpa, “I can’t be sure that I am not, at this moment, still holding her.”
Yes, Botanica’s premise alone is genuinely tragic and sad. But to ignore this work in light of this fact is a disservice to Taranto as well as to whoever may read it: Taranto’s depiction of grief and suffering does not wallow. He states his experience as fact and moves on, which is often more emotionally resonant than beating a reader over the head with sadness. Early on, a doctor friend of his says to him, “What a gift you have to feel so deeply, and what a burden, too.” Even in his weakest moments, he writes of seeing blooming flowers, or cactuses surviving in the harshest conditions. He inspires the question: how different are we from plants, really? We’re all trying to survive.
Taranto’s writing is born of suffering, but is about surviving and thriving in a beautiful world. He seeks to find beauty in even the most tragic moments, to find acceptance in all parts of the world, including and especially those finite ones we cannot control. Ars Botanica is lyrical, emotional, and honest: an excellent memoir. Through his honesty about pain, Taranto’s work becomes universally relatable. I finished the book in that same cold garden, genuinely touched by the “sense that maybe time was more than a measure of decay,” and that Ars Botanica is more than just ruminations on plants, but on the resilient nature of life and love.