Garden on an Alien Star System

A gimlet-eyed catalogue of the natural world, and, contained within it, the world within ourselves. Irresistible language makes it a classic.

Andrew Sean Greer, author of the novel LESS, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner



The prose poem, "Hose. Ants. Plants. Expressway." alone makes this delightful chapbook worthy of our close consideration-and is emblematic, too, of this glorious, serious, humorous, loving paean to the natural world and us in it, in this, to quote another poem, "personal myth of the garden.

Claire Ortalda, Georgia State University Fiction Prize Winner



In Judith Cody's gorgeous collection of poems, Garden on an Alien Star, a fistful of soil is a place of endless wonder, where the poet sings praises to decay, and a window box is a magical crossroads where the human and natural worlds interact. The gardener's many relationships with her flowers and weeds are full of metaphors for personal and spiritual relationships. Everyday experiences take on mythical stature, in one poem it's a line of ants along a garden hose, in another poem it's "a descending cascade of petals" distracting a brown towhee from an earwig. The poems in this collection offer the poet's vision of a backyard Eden where today's creation legends continue to be forever born and reborn.

John Curl, author of novels, The Outlaws of Maroon, The Co-op Conspiracy and the history, Indigenous Peoples Day