Rappaccini’s Garden by Jules Jacob and Sonja Johanson

To open Rappaccini’s Garden: Poisonous Poetry is to step through a wrought-iron gate into an enchanted place. The chapbook, a collaboration between master gardeners Jules Jacob and Sonja Johanson, is structured like a botanist’s field notebook. Color illustrations provided by the Biodiversity Heritage Library give the effect of finding a long-forgotten pressed flower between the pages. The collection is more than a compendium of plants, though; it is full of women—farmers, foragers, midwives—whose knowledge of the natural world provides them with food, medicine, and, yes, power. Women with the ability to use plants for everything from fever reducers to abortives have historically been as likely to be accused of witchcraft as to be revered as pharmacists.

The opening poem, “Rosary Pea,” introduces this theme, privileging science over superstition while also highlighting the gendered double standard. The plant is named for the common use of its seeds as rosary beads, and the men hawking / rose gardens of prayers believe the rosary to be the source of the seeds’ power. However, they discover no amount of Glory Bes / can stop their heavy sweating, a symptom of the plant’s poison. Meanwhile, the women who wear the seeds as jewelry for their ability to repel fleas understand their practical power. Just like the women who populate the poems, Jacob and Johanson are deeply knowledgeable—they use modern medical terms for the plants’ effects on the body, from the cardiac glycosides of the lily of the valley to the emetic effect of the yellow flag iris. They are equally fluent in botanical language, with words like corymb, terete, and drupes, which are both lovely for their sounds and precise in their meanings.

And yet, for all their focus on physical and chemical attributes, the poems cast spells. The lists of plant structures, regional names, and effects (both deleterious and desirable) are incantatory. Take, for example, the trochaic chant of “Yellow Flag Iris:” Petals, sepals, falls and standards, or this from “Mango Tree:” Sea fig honey, bee swarms drip. It’s easy to imagine a witch reciting these lines while stirring a cauldron. Some poems read like recipes for tinctures and ointments, like “White Oak,” with its acorns rock-shelled, soaked soft / cracked / open with a maul. Others, like “Deadly Nightshade,” could be warnings listed on pill bottles, if those warnings were written by poets. This one ends (both the poem and the poison) in

snip thread-lives         close
our eyes with pupils still dilated.

These lines showcase the poets’ linguistic alchemy. The line break after close makes the word flicker from a modifier describing the length of the life-threads to a verb enacting the nightshade’s ability to close a person’s eyes in death.

Sea fig honey, bee swarms drip.

What makes something seem magical is the mystery of its workings, which is probably why a plant’s effect on the body is so easily mistaken for magic. For one unaware of the rosary pea’s powers as an aphrodisiac, its application must seem like a love spell (though if you are tempted to test that out, read the opening poem a few more times). But just as I don’t need to understand the chemistry of aspirin to know that my headache is gone, I don’t need to understand every detail in a poem for it to work its magic. This is how I felt about the poets’ use of allusion; they balance references the average non-botanist reader like me might recognize and ones that are more obscure. Catching the significance of the final line of “Poet’s Narcissus,” in which echoes have the final word gives a jolt of pleasure, like unexpectedly running into an old friend. The reference to Saint Catherine in “Giant Hogweed” was unfamiliar but alluring. I frequently found myself turning to Google to further an acquaintance. The only downside to my research is that if I’m someday accused of murder, I’ll be convicted based on my browsing history alone.

With such depth of knowledge to impart, Jacob and Johanson could easily have ended up composing poetic Wikipedia entries. Instead they distill gallons of sap into dollops of syrup on the tongue. They give the plants emotional heft by introducing a multitude of voices; some poems speak to the plants, others speak for them. There are both omniscient and first-person narrators, as well as some who speak as a collective. Many poems use narrative action to impart the plants’ traits and histories, like “Crow Poison,” in which

The sheep
stumbled drunkenly
before dying,
stagger grass
found in the corner pasture grazed upon.

The origin of stagger grass is conveyed through a distressing scene. It’s not only the sheep we mourn—the daughter of the shepherdess laments the destruction of the plant’s bulbs; she would have hung / them in the house / for fly paper. The conflict between the mother and daughter over the dual nature of crow poison highlights an important element of Rappucini’s Garden. For all their poison, the plants are not villains; many have equally desirable traits, whether as pesticides or painkillers.

In addition to their visual appeal, the illustrations demystify allusions and figurative language. Without them, literal descriptions of the plants’ physical traits might be necessary in order to understand the metaphors. But the drawing of mountain laurel helps us see the small balloons / lifting away, and the depiction the white snakeroot’s blossoms helps us appreciate the women in their crinoline / cages. While the two-dimensional renderings are lovely, it’s metaphors like these that make the plants three-dimensional, evoking moods ranging from seduction to dread.

Ultimately, like the flora contained in it, Rappaccini’s Garden refuses to be just one thing. Though the plants share one common property—toxicity—they are complex and varied, as are the poems Jacobs and Johanson concoct from them. In her poem “Spelling,” Margaret Atwood asserts a word after a word / after a word is power. So it is with this collection, which distills a vast amount knowledge into a slim book of spells. And perhaps this is what spells have been all along: scientific knowledge conveyed through poetry.

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Suzanne Langlois’s collection Bright Glint Gone won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in Quarterly West, Whale Road Review, Scoundrel Time, and Rust + Moth. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and teaches high school English in Maine.