National Network for Equitable Library Service

Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet's motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing-held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing. Housty's poems are textural-blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow-and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader's whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors' bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty's exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community. Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.