About Trees

About Trees is the first book in the Broken Dimanche Press series Parapoetics - A Literature beyond the Human. Recognising a crisis of representation as our species adapts to life in the Anthropocene, About Trees considers our relationship with language, landscape, and perception. The result is an astonishing fusion of storytelling and art, which celebrates trees and our understanding of them, their past and their future, their potential and their ubiquity. It is a book to leaf through, again and again. The Anthropocene forces us to revise grammatical categories and experiment with alternative modes of representation within a 'we' of monstrous planetary proportions. It forces the questions: Who speaks, and on behalf of whom? How does the non-human articulate itself, and how do we identify such articulations? –Ida Bencke, Editor, BDP. "Gently reaching, beautiful, bountiful — Katie Holten's About Trees translates pulp and ink into a new language of roots and branches, a bewildering, awilding forest of words as strange as it is unforgettable. Learning to live in the Anthropocene means learning to see, listen to, and speak with our world in whole new ways; About Trees helps us begin that transformation." —Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene "The political resistance movements of the future could communicate secret messages with trees—and go down in history as the slowest revolution ever. Holten is in full compliance with these plans, and actually has a few ideas of her own. "I was reading about the Obama library today. Their budget is something like $1 billion. I immediately was thinking, 'I wonder if they are thinking about landscaping the garden and need some sort of typographic forest?" she says with a laugh. "I feel like this is just beginning, there's a lot more to come. More volumes—and I want [the typeface] to be planted in real life, too." —Meg Miller, FAST CO DESIGN