Geranium, by Tyler Barstow

In Geranium: A Floral History of the World, memory and mythology are synonyms, the heart is a wild animal with teeth, and grief is the inheritance of love.

Structured around the four final photographs Robert Landsburg took during the eruption of Mount St. Helens, this collection is a journey into accepting an irreducible human truth: our lives introduce us to a great beauty we cannot control and will not survive. It wrestles in the dark with the angelic question of whether love is our attempt at eternity or our acknowledgement of it, and it is unconcerned with how we look to the people around us when we confess to spending our nights talking to ghosts.

In turns both mystical and brutally real, Geranium is a meditation on Whitman’s days that must happen to us and an altar to the parts of us that survive them.