On Plants and Animals

Author: Ida Vitale

Publisher: Point Zero Press (2025)

Translator: Sean Manning

In "On Plants and Animals", one of the Spanish language’s most celebrated poets mingles personal and literary anecdotes over sixty short essays, arranging them like compartments in her own herbarium-bestiary-library. Conceived as a grafting of natural sciences with literature, "On Plants and Animals" ranges across generations, cultures and languages, considering everything from the dancing bean (sliced open by a contentious surrealist) and the variations of toad songs to the loss of a pet dog during Vitale's years in exile. The result is a private canon of ecocritical thought that treats the natural world as an interlocking set of parts, while also attempting to "glimpse the reserve of spiritual tension nature has to offer."