The color green is at the center of the spectrum. For earlier writers like Emily Dickinson or William Blake, the green world was a space of haunting, irreconcilable, opposites: life and death, human and vegetal, innocence and experience. In these essays, letters, repetitions, and experiments, poet and scholar Gillian Osborne adds a third, contemporary, term: the environment as both vital and ailing. This is nature writing outside of adventure or argument, ecological thinking as a space of shared homemaking: reading, writing, and living in vicinity with others.

Gillian Osborne is a writer, educator, and aspirational gardener living in California. She is the co-editor of a collection of critical essays on modern and contemporary ecopoetics, and teaches for the Harvard Extension School and the Bard College Language & Thinking Program.