Ars Botanica is a moving meditation on grief, memory, and the way we return to ourselves after experiencing loss.
Written as letters to his unborn child, Taranto remembers the infinite pleasures of falling in love — the small discoveries of each other's otherness, the crush of desire, the frightening closeness — and the terrifying impossibility of losing someone. Through examinations of the ways in which various cultures and religions carry grief, Taranto discovers the emotional instincts that shape his own mourning. He seeks solace in the natural elements of our world, divining meaning from the Iowa fields that stretch around him, the stones he collects, the plants he discovers on walks through the woods. At times astonishingly personal and even painful, Ars Botanica is a field guide for love, grief, and celebrating life.
"What I found in Tim Taranto's beautiful, huge-hearted, searingly personal meditation on grief was a bright center of emotional truth that left me reeling. Drafted in a white heat during a difficult fall, Ars Botanica tells the story of the end of a relationship, written as a series of letters to the son the couple conceived but never bore. It is, on the one hand, heartbreakingly sad. But it is also full of warmth, good faith, and good humor."
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Tim Taranto is from Upstate, New York. His work has appeared on Buzzfeed, The Rumpus, The Paris Review Daily, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and others. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.