Leaf Manifesto examines the trend of women turning into trees through the lens of standardized testing. Informative, playful, and often participatory, Leaf Manifesto is a beginner’s guide to treehood for anyone interested in being a tree, being a woman, or being alive. An earlier version of this manuscript was a finalist for the 2024 Sowell Emerging Writers Prize.
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In a landscape where women become trees, communities are many-leafed and greened, and evolution is always one step away, Laurel Radzieski’s Leaf Manifesto introduces to contemporary poetry a haunting biosphere previously unimagined. Replete with “root rot” and “unification,” the poems in Leaf Manifesto are a staggering homage to the loneliness and rebirth of transition. While the speaker is preoccupied with arboreal transformation, a modern-day reader can’t help but glean from these poems a fierce resistance to U.S. fascism and transphobia. “Must I always be how I have always been?” asks Radzieski’s speaker. And, later: “I knew I was not in heaven / because none of us / had ever died.” This book gives me hope.

– Remi Recchia, author of Quicksand/Stargazing

Employing a medley of forms, Radzieski weds fantasy and social critique to reconsider womanhood. These inquisitive and inventive poems playfully masquerade while encouraging personal transformation. Looking to trees as, at times, paradigms of wholeness and freedom, Radzieski here presents an ecopoetry in the style of mythology. These are poems in which you will find continual inspiration and delight.

—Christopher Nelson, editor of Green Linden Press, author of Blood Aria, Fugitive and Windshear

In Leaf Manifesto, Laurel Radzieski invites readers on a journey that tenderly subverts “society’s linear tendencies,” offering sharp insights rooted in deceptively simple language. Through a playful and thought-provoking question/answer, true/false format, Radzieski challenges our assumptions about identity and what it means to live freely. “Women are dangerous. / Best cross to the other side of the street / when one or several of them are near,” she writes—an inversion that typifies the book’s ability to turn the familiar inside out. Leaf Manifesto invites us to imagine transformation not as escape, but as liberation: to create a life “with a goal that [doesn’t] / stem from shame.” This graceful reimagining of self is both manifesto and meditation—a captivating exploration of what grows when we choose to root ourselves differently.

—Elena Georgiou, author of The Immigrant’s Refrigerator

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Laurel Radzieski is a poet and the author of Red Mother, a love story told from the perspective of a parasite that was published by NYQ Books in 2018 and won the 2020 Whirling Prize in Poetry from Etchings Press. Her poems have appeared in Witcraft, The New York Quarterly, Rust + Moth, Atlas and Alice, House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, Clockhouse, Hoot, and elsewhere, including on a street sign and roadsides in Wisconsin. She earned her MFA at Goddard College and has been a writer-in-residence at Wormfarm Institute. Laurel enjoys writing poems for strangers in community spaces. She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania and writes at the Goggleworks Center. When not writing poems, Laurel is the Director of Grants at Alvernia University. She enjoys playing board games that take up the whole table.