Introducing the Expanded Chapbook Edition of
Please Plant This Book
Featuring Poetry & Art by Francis Daulerio & Scott Hutchison
Foreword by Ianthe Brautigan
Afterword by Michael Pedersen
Photography by Rachael Spiegel
(CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT) Available exclusively through The Head & The Hand Press.
A reinterpretation of Richard Brautigan’s original 1968 release, this expanded chapbook edition of the sold-out seed collection features Francis Daulerio’s poetry and Scott Hutchison’s art along with words from Ianthe Brautigan, Michael Pedersen, and unreleased photography by Rachael Spiegel from last year’s shoot. Available now, all proceeds benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Click here to order.
Please Plant This Book has been made possible thanks to donation from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, MIDCO Global Agricultural Supply, and The Estate of Richard Brautigan.
Praise for Please Plant This Book:
“One of the superpowers of the artist is the ability to speak with the dead, to braid the voice of a departed beloved in with their own. In this collection, Francis Daulerio and Scott Hutchison have captured that bit of essential magic, braiding their unique collaboration with the spirit of Richard Brautigan’s seminal 1968 Please Plant This Book. The effect is staggering, gorgeous, essential. In one of Brautigan’s original poems, he wrote ‘The only hope we have is our / children and the seeds we give them.’ In your hands you hold both the children and their seeds—what an impossible luck. As Daulerio writes in the final poem of this collection: ‘We exist for a season / then turn our soil / over to new blooms.'”
– Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
“The best poetry collections invite us to read and reread, taking away some new sweetness each time we revisit the work. Please Plant This Book does that and more—it invites us not only to savor these poems, but to share them in the most tangible of ways, in ‘places full of bright, growing life.'”
– Kelly Davio, author of It’s Just Nerves
“Francis has written a beautiful collection of poems about a subject I would do well to immerse myself more fully in. Of all the superlatives I could proffer, I am stuck on but one. It is the perfect read for a 30-degree and cloudy Monday morning. A book that encourages a thoughtful and positive approach to the beginning of something new.”
– Richard Edwards, Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset
“Francis Daulerio is a masterful poet, but more so, a callus-handed gardener, slowly peeling back the layers of the simple and often unseen beauty of the human experience.”
—Gregory Alan Isakov, The Weatherman
“With poems like “German Chamomile” and “Berlicum Carrot,” plant names that are poems themselves, this book is a beautiful companion to Richard Brautigan’s 1968 original: spare, relaxed, wise, and true. What is this feeling washing over me as I read these poems? My god, it’s happiness. I’d almost forgotten it. As Daulerio writes, in “Henry Wilde Sunflower”: “There is still room for us here. // Do not let your eyes adjust / to the darkness.” I’m grateful to this book for the light it’s shining. Just imagine what will grow in that light.”
—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
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