Lettuce, Lettuce, Please Go Bad
lettuce lettuce please go bad is an incantation and a plea for transformation. Using the idea of compost as composition – since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life – the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing rituals, the cycles of the moon, experiences of stress and grief, and inherited and invented agricultural practices to tease out a poetics of rural embodied language. Situated at the moment when thought becomes image, lettuce lettuce please go bad expands on the author’s personal history of familial migration and agrarian labour – picking, pruning, grafting, tending, planting – entangled in issues of colonization, land manipulation, ownership, extraction, and food production. In an effort to think through the ways vegetables, fruits, and other foods can stand in for complex situations and emotions, La Melia reconsiders how value is allotted and advocates a return to love to mitigate both personal and collective crises.
Tiziana La Melia is an artist and poet raised on an orchard in Syilx/Okanagan territories who gleans from a wide-cast net of references, from fantasy and fable to science and technology to kletic hymns, queer theory, mend narratives, and personal stories. Tiziana has published two books of poetry and an album: Kletic Kink, The Eyelash and the Monochrome, and Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect. A dual-language (Italian and English) edition of her poetry is forthcoming.
