Thank you for your support of independent human authors and small presses
Also available directly through Nauset Press: A Varied and Often Tender Multiplicity ($26.99)
 
This book is a collection of my best spells, incantations, rituals, lyric prose, formal experiments, and poems; some were published in literary magazines and anthologies, some were rejected or never sent out. What connects them here, in this meadow, is that they all contain signatures of subtle but symbiotic traces of plant medicines which I have been researching, using, and wondering about since I was a teenager. Each poem is accompanied by a Materia medica (plant description) which connects it to the meadow of trees and plants— the field of varied and tender multiplicities—that is woven into the background of the poem. The book is illustrated with sketches and cyanotypes of the plants, and the book interior is printed in monochrome green. The poet Edwin Torres calls this "a book which embodies worldbeing as a mindbody state.”   
 
Praise for A Varied and Often Tender Multiplicy 
 
K (Kristin) Prevallet has been a wildly performative and investigative poet for decades, always at the edge of what matters, what she studies and transforms into trenchant meditative activist language. The meadow is what is needed; we return to it, to grow, to return. Asphodel Meadows are an ancient section of hell in Greek mythology where souls (poets?) kept on churning, even in the underworld.    
—Anne Waldman,  Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa University and author of over 60 books.  
 
An anima-materia medica, with the lyric ear of a good spell, KPrevallet’s …Tender… Meadowing…, the work of decades, makes me want to run outside to be with those green ones I love. These poems know that bodies are archives and portals, and that plants are the ancestors, conversation partners, and healers who know where we’ve been and where we’re going. I am outside, already, reading it. 
—Gillian Osborne, author of Green Green Green (Nightboat Books) and co-editor of the anthology Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field.
 
K Prevellat’s poetry is so damned alive! It blossoms, then bursts, words spread on winds, re-seeding elsewhere, twisting, unfurling, reaching for sun. You can lie down in her lines and hear the tiny beings scrabbling up their stems. 
 —Betsy Andrews, is a Society of American Travel Writers award-winning journalist and the author of Crowded (Nauset Press) and Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip.
 
KPrevallet's poetry intertwines the ethereal and the tangible, inviting a contemplation of the connections between the human spirit and the natural world. Evocative, politically steeped, and resonating with the beauty that lives in the shadow of melancholy, Prevallet's work offers a reflection on the entanglements of experience.
—Hoa Nguyen, recipient of the Griffin prize and author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
 
KPrevallet’s new book A Borrowed and Often Tender Multiplicity animates my view of the agency of plants and their relationship to humans. She achieves this goal in several ways. Whatever she writes in these marvelous and shape-shifting poems appears initially as one thing but quickly becomes another: “lake that is / no longer lake but a hole in the ground where the water is…” In her poems even agents become the things they affect: “everything that falls is gravity….” With such radical reallocations of language, the poems themselves no longer operate in the distanced and disrupted conditions of modern politics but her language becomes what it points to, what’s supposed to be impossible.… Tender Multiplicity achieves these wonderous transformations through pairing plant descriptions with poems displacing plant identity to “remove all nouns from your vision.”     
— James Sherry, founder of the Segue Foundation and author of 14 books of poetry and theory.     
 
In "A Few Stray Comments on the Cultivation of the Lyric" Gustaf Sobin wrote: "don't write a poem: grow it. it's a shoot(the breath-in-sprig) that we'd train onto a trellis:... the poem grows out of the poem, not out of one's own particular intellect. the intellect is merely a guide, a gardener, to those shoots, to those roots: to that ever deeper set of imperatives which are first of all organic". No poet has ever more fully lived this compositional practice than K Prevallet in A Borrowed and Often Tender Multiplicity; here plants are poems and textual lineage, and poems are specific plants, both lyric and researched. Prevallet, who almost singlehandedly brought the poetry of Helen Adam back into presence, now draws deeply from that witches' brew of life magic and medicine, often returning us to a meadow, as in Robert Duncan. In "Arnica", framed for us by Hildegard, we learn that "In the woods I was born but not to a mother/A Monster, a mutter, a mute woman with a gun/And gin to the brim", even as the book deeply plumbs the loss of one's mother, deepening the paradox and mystery. "Imagination - Imago- Mythos" all flow here into the richest kind of eco-poetics we could ever hope for.    
— Leonard Schwartz, author of over ten books of poetry and multi-genre poetics and professor at Evergreen State College