Review of Weeds and Stars

by Lisa Rosenberg

The Word Works, 2026

More Weeds Than Stars: On Lisa Rosenberg's Weeds and Stars

As a former Stegner Fellow and with a Poet Laureateship to her name, Lisa Rosenberg comes with her fair share of accolades. In Weeds and Stars, her work—plant voice, animist epistemology, the botany of the overlooked—works a peculiar terrain. But a book this precise, this formally alive, is worth praising on other grounds, and is "marvelous through and through." The “marvelous through and through” appears in what Rosenberg makes from the American physicist Richard Feynman's rapturous description of a rose. My goal here is revelation: considering how this excellent new collection of poetry itself effloresces, that’s not a bad place to start.

Lao Tzu, and the Tao, float the lazy river running through this book. The Tao’s suggestion that a little less of the self, with a bit more nature, might point the way can be found here, as when in the titular poem a lattice carries a vine it has long since stopped noticing. In the Tao Te Ching, the named emerges from the nameless; to name a thing is to pull it from namelessness. Named, a thing inherits personhood and character in order with our own. Rosenberg takes this philosophical premise and runs it through her well-tended herbarium.

The identification of various plants in these pages imbues them with something like personhood—not metaphorically, not as rhetorical concession to the environmentally conscientious, but ontologically. The herbarium poems in Weeds and Stars do not describe plants; they let plants speak, or allow the author to speak through as well as to them, Rosenberg’s animism being so thoroughly structural that a reader who approaches this book as a polite naturalist will miss where its energetics actually dwell. Take the opening gesture of "Sun, Flower": "The center of anything has work to do." That move does not merely begin the poem, our halved sunflower announces a poetics: centripetal, cosmological, indifferent to the hierarchy that separates aster from galaxy.

The herbarium, Weeds and Stars’ prose section, operates figuratively, organizing dialogue with or about these plants, and "Sun, Flower" rests, as it were, on the collection’s sill, an opening statement of what Rosenberg intends; that is, whether or not she always lands the leap between micro, the aster, and macro, Orion.

Rosenberg's use of the appositional comma—"Sun, Flower," "Snow, Flake," "Golden, Ratio," "Still, Life,"—acts as a technical hinge where language should otherwise compound. For instance, while "Still, Life" suggests a painted arrangement of objects, the comma fractures the compound and, in doing so, releases a second reading: this continues to be life, life as it has always been, as it now stands. This uncoupling and doubling performs Weeds and Stars' central argument about naming, separation, and relation. Few living poets punctuate their titles, torturing them with caesuras, quite the way that Rosenberg does. Rosenberg's other great structural strategy is recurrence, and the herbarium sequence is its most developed expression. Fourteen poems, each named for a species of plant ("Herbarium: Common Agapanthus," "Herbarium: Pokeberry," "Herbarium: Clary Sage") are distributed across the book’s three sections with seasonal predictability.

These prose poems, varying in both length and internal structure, with changing point of view and speaker, share a core move: they relocate the lyric voice from an observing human to a shared field of being. And when Rosenberg speaks in "we" ("For we shall inherit this dirt") plant and human flatten into a system of relations. Call it the Spinozian current: natura naturans, nature naturing itself. Form, in Weeds and Stars, is far from ornamental. It's where the poems either succeed or fail. Rosenberg works across an unusually wide formal range, including sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, centones, carmina figurata, abecedarians, and litanies, and the book rewards readers who track these structures as carefully as they follow Rosenberg’s deciduous imagery.

In all, the prose poems—“Sun, Flower,” the Herbarium series, “Is a Rose,” “Sunflower,” and “Sea Star”—operate rhetorically, their compression a matter of syntax under pressure rather than versification. The sonnets in particular—“Dear Neighbor,” “Magnolia x soulangeana,” and the gloriously self-aware “For the Gibbous Moon,” dedicated to the lunar phrase no one writes sonnets for—demonstrate the formal confidence that comes from scientific precision married to the creative forces of her imagination.

Meanwhile, the pantoums (“Praise on Pi Day,” with its strict interlocking quatrains, “Lessons of the Crinoids,” with its looser, tidal flow of return and alteration, and “Weeds and Stars,” where interlocking lines work across stanzas) adds to the collection’s ambitious architecture. See the twin refrains of “The Rain Weighs In” —"Even the rain seems given to extremes" and "So little moderation in all things"—which, in adapting the villanelle to a modified structure, orbit each other like binary stars. “Affirmation” and “Citrus” are traditional litanies pure and unashamed, forms of praise interwoven with other intimations of praise. Consider how the series of "after" poems—“Still, Life,” from Auden; “Aquarium,” from Plath; “Quarantine Morning,” from Stevens; “Of Mere Seeing,” Stevens again; and “Note to Archaic Self,” from Rilke—constitute a connected argument, implicit throughout the book, about inheritance, adaptation, and the uses of the tradition. We live in an age that rewards the proudly worn badge of I know nothing about that stuff, treating metrical ignorance as street credibility. Against this backdrop, Rosenberg's formal consciousness deserves recognition.

The lineated poems carry the burden of prosody, and the spectrum is wide. "No one writes sonnets for the gibbous moon," opens “For the Gibbous Moon” in a strict ten syllables and five clean iambs, the meter as inevitable as the argument. “Dear Neighbor” sustains something close to a loose iambic pentameter from its opening line—"Jupiter or Venus, whoever you are"—through a sequence of substitutions that keep the underlying contract audible without ever going stiff. But then, as “Affirmation” begins, "At least the vagaries of light. At least"—pentameter, the mid-line caesura doing double work, splitting the anaphora across its own beat.

At the freer end of things, “Fire Sky” breaks into fragments, with white space functioning as breath: "First sweet smoke / grass-heads and deadwood / the undergrowth / undone in one / swath of heat."

First sweet smoke

grass-heads and deadwood

the undergrowth

undone in one

swath of heat

This elemental style, like Robert Duncanesque, freeform Calders, hangs less well among Rosenberg’s gallery of precise forms. These mobiles, superior to the confetti that turns up in random trade magazines (and I acknowledge that the demonstration of the form has value in some cases), might, in this case, have been better served by a less formal imitation of this elliptical structure. The use of white space feels arbitrary; Duncan is nearly impossible to master.

“Still, Life,” easy to miss amid Weeds and Stars’ more immediately accessible poems, warrants extended attention as the collection's most formally intricate achievement. Rosenberg adapts Auden's "The Fall of Rome," with its short, enjambed lines, loose iambic base, and catalog-and-collapse structure, an understated apocalypse managed by formal control. Fortunately, she has inherited Auden’s meter without sounding like karaoke.

Rosenberg departs from Auden’s rhythm most decisively in her syntax, which she allows to spill across line breaks in ways Auden, who tended to keep syntax and meter aligned, did not permit himself:

fantastically

fast deliveries, and random

bouts of rain and thievery.

While "Fantastically" hangs as an adverb without anchor as an anchor, "fast deliveries" pulls the bowline taut; the rhythm sways drunkenly.

The closing turn, however, mirrors Auden's structural logic—life continuing elsewhere, in its diminished, indifferent way—but Rosenberg's closing stanza earns a special kind of admiration:

Across the garden bed,

scarlet-throated hummers

compete for drink and prey;

a little birdhouse eyes

imaginary enemies.

Who would not have wanted to write that stanza? The apocalyptic and the global attributed so humbly to the paranoia of a garden, a birdhouse, its hummers: it is the Audenic move perfected, shrunk down to the scale of suburban ornament, political fury and ecological grief compressed to a small, domestic absurdity.

Weeds and Stars is strongest when line, repetition, and constraint generate the pressure from which feeling emerges. It weakens when, occasionally, gesture substitutes for formal pressure. “Orion Over Winter Vineyard,” for instance, accumulates lyric atmosphere without quite earning it, and Orion has had too many competent treatments for a newcomer to announce itself with confidence. But the book's major arcana are not the stars. They are the plants, and Rosenberg tends them with greater intelligence and more genuine risk. The plant poems are tended with more intelligence and risk than her star poems.

Agapanthus, for instance, has never had a better interpreter:

You know that heap of us, tossed to the curb, on trash day? A hardy colony by now. Soon, a cloud of ruffled trumpets afloat on sturdy stalks. For we shall inherit this dirt. No fuss, no thirst. From scrappiest to perkiest, all we ask is turf.

That —"You know that heap of us"—achieves immediate intimacy through the second person, the plant speaking to a human being, who has been a little negligent. "Herbarium: Giant Reeds" works on a different register, being all guardianship and suppressed accusation, as when Rosenberg writes, "Mythology let you off easy. If I had a secret, you're the last place I'd bury it." The voice speaks to the poem’s reeds as if we already understand how well they are known for their character flaw, the whispering of secrets.

“Citrus” earns its litany through precise tonal management—"By which I mean the blossom, not the fruit. / By which I mean the scent and not the sight"—the anaphora narrowing elegantly to its closing line, "By which I mean the acrid with the sweet." With “Affirmation,” its companion piece, the formal strategy is identical, but the emotional register is pitched a half step higher, “to gild the compost heap,” the Bishop-esque slant holding sentiment’s “sweet” just far enough from sentimentality to let “acrid” breathe.

“Tideland in November” feels most lived and therefore most alive, its bullet-point stanzas—"Heron, mud hen, fennel" and "Salt grass, fennel" recur like a wave that each time leaves different debris—achieving through the most minimal means the distributed attention that the whole collection recommends.

Here I return to the aforementioned “Ask,” perhaps the purest expression of the book's animist argument. It opens with an imperative directed at the human, asks us to consult the wide wild world “before wheels and feet / remake it” and closes with a photographer's instruction to record this day "among days of no rain," the dithyrambic beats and alternating slant and full rhyme enacting the very song of broken pattern it describes. How does a leaf carry the message of the tree from which it drops? Read this book with a wildflower guide, if you can locate one. Rosenberg demands that the natural world be real, not merely metaphorical, and when the physicist-poet in her channels that specificity, the poems glow with what one can only call a Spinozian luminosity. The risk she takes is not that of the comic abecedarian; “L.O.V.E. Letters” is a delight, but it is not where the book bets its life. The “Tao” plays a comic force within rather than as a sidekick.

The humor throughout Weeds and Stars comes more from Rosenberg’s timing than from stand-up comedy. The deeper, more important risk resides in the book’s insistence that a weed named is a consciousness acknowledged. When the work fearlessly offers that the foils of art and poetic craft and form in relation to animism are not competing values but a single argument made by different means.

When poetry gives us a glimpse of cohabiting in the universe with an animate world as vigorous as—or more vigorous than—our own, we feel the delight of perception shifting. We sense, and in sensing, we change how we see. The next agapanthus you encounter, say hello. Touch it gently so you might learn a thing or two.

We have, in Weeds and Stars, more weeds than stars. The book is right to prefer it that way.