Written in memoir form through the language of flowers, this book of poems examines a daughter’s chronic illness in order to consider the vastness of human connection.

Floriography Child is a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings. Through poems, micro-essays, and visual art, Floriography Child addresses fundamental questions about purpose, connection, and resilience. Written in memoir form, this book examines the mother-daughter relationship and its intimacies in the context of a daughter’s developing chronic illness. How to bear another’s suffering—how to find sustenance in a world fraught with uncertainty and pain—is addressed through the language of flowers and the natural world. Ultimately, this book asks us to consider how each of us, whatever our path, is connected.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Poems in this collection appear as psalms or elegies for an ill daughter, often rendered through a mother’s obsession with flowers. The poems are like small impressionist paintings by a poet with a controlled hand and eye and strong voice.”
—Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems

“In stark movements of mind, the touching and keen language here radiates a mother’s verdant love for a daughter beset with chronic illness. That love is aching and palpable, full of strength and resolve. And thus, the poems in Floriography echo in layers and in Krueger’s profound music, a spirit of wisdom I find rich, intoxicating, and integral.”

—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man