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A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?
Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion. In this vibrant book of linked essays, she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people – and the language we use to describe them. Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place" – whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hand.
Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in precise and poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong – or not – as they border cross, and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, Dispersals, children's book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and the University of King's College. She lives in Berlin.
– Shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize Longlist 2024 for UK Nature Writing
"A stunning record of inheritance, memory and belonging [...] In Lee's writing, you feel the radical potential of the essay form; at once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life"
– Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water
"Profound, poetic, illuminating and moving, Dispersals' deep knowledge, sensitivity and research (worn so lightly) addresses just how entwined our fortunes, migration and language are with plants; how much we are part of nature. Important and vivid"
– Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down
"Contemplative, elegant, neatly structured [...] In a series of concise, interlocking essays, she entwines her personal story with the political history of different plants"
– New Statesman
"The author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection. An insightful meditation on nature and identity within 'a world in motion"
– Kirkus Review
"Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline [...] This deserves a wide audience"
– Publishers Weekly
"A beautiful book about belonging – plant and human. A work that will make you look at the orange in your hand, the moss underfoot, the tea that you sip a little more closely. Lee turns her careful gaze to the easy stories we tell ourselves about foreign and native, and leaves us with a vision of the world simultaneously more nuanced and more precious"
– Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days
"Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings – by people and by plants – to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration"
– Literary Hub
"Dispersals is a beautifully written and complex book [...] [Lee] shows us with stunning prose, tenderness and precision the unexpected ways that we all connect and are connected by the plants around us"
– Amanda Thomson, author of Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home
"One of the most interesting and celebrated contemporary writers of nature, identity and place [...] her work deftly interweaves personal memoir and family history with botany, cultural criticism and first-hand observations of the natural world"
– The Berliner
"Lee's lyrical prose sprouts from a fertile ground of intensive research and intimate memories – memories that are by turns sharply vivid and pleasantly hazy with the distance of time [...] She moves seamlessly from seaweed to soybeans to citrus [...] Jessica J. Lee will make you stop and smell the weeds"
– The Cut
"Richly textured [...] These essays critically probe the native/nonnative paradigm of invasive-species ecology. Lee's voice will stay with readers long after they finish this book"
– Library Journal (starred review)
"[A] lyrical essay collection [...] Lee writes intimately about her own oscillating cravings for movement and rootedness [...] Dispersals shows us that we cannot view the trajectory of a plant without bumping into trajectories of human power"
– Scientific American
"A brilliant, thoughtful, and thought-provoking collection of essays, which expertly blend personal reflection and natural history [...] you will not look at the plants around you in the same way again"
– Polly Atkin, author of Some of Us Just Fall
"Exquisite, haunting [...] Lee continues her insistent, clear-eyed quest for nourishment and vitality, even when both are complicated, and encourages readers to do the same"
– Shelf Awareness
"Dispersals draws a gorgeous, sprawling map of the diaspora of flora [...] The themes in these fourteen essays become invigorating and intimate in Lee's hand"
– CBC Books
