Vigilance is No Orchard – Poets Hazel White, Denise Newman and Jennifer S. Cheng

Hazel White is the author of Vigilance Is No Orchard, just published by Nightboat Books. And also of Peril as Architectural Enrichment, from Kelsey Street Press. In 2016, she completed with poet Denise Newman a two-year public poetry project, Biotic Portal at Strawberry Creek, bioticportal.com, a collaboration with the UC Botanical Garden, at Berkeley, supported by a Creative Work Fund grant. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Elderly, and Fence. She grew up on farms in England, and works in the Agriculture and Natural Resources Department of UC Davis.

In Vigilance Is No Orchard, Hazel White records her haunting romance with the Valentine Garden, a famous garden, now a ruin, in Montecito, California, designed by landscape architect Isabelle Greene. White is jealous of Greene’s power to affect a dynamic experience of space, tries to make language play faithfully in the game coursing between the body and Greene’s fiercely stirring landscape. Her poems dwell in shelter and view, and time passing. They chase animation and survival, forage and repair, the act of making, accumulation, authority of form, and realize a dream of overflow, which gives way to loss, as in flowering.

Denise Newman’s poetry collections are Future People, The New Make Believe, Wild Goods, and Human Forest. She is the translator of Azorno and The Painted Room, both by the late Danish poet, Inger Christensen, and Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt, which won the 2015 PEN Translation Award and an NEA Fellowship. She teaches at the California College of the Arts.

Jennifer S. Cheng writes at the intersection of essay and poetry. Her debut book, House A , was selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and she is the author of the new collection MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize.Her writing appears in Tin House, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Literary Hub, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Guernica, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN HK anthology), and elsewhere. Having grown up in Texas, Connecticut, and Hong Kong, she is a longtime resident of the Outer Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco.