Remember the Flowers by Enni Harlan

Remember the Flowers by Enni Harlan

Stained pants on a summer day. A recess spent exploring the world in an imagined canoe. A few days spent bouncing between relatives' houses during fumigation. In this collection of narrative poems that span early childhood to the pandemic, Enni Harlan turns her sharp, sometimes darkly comic eye to what it means to live in between-in between cultures, in between childhood and adulthood, in between reality and imagination, in between the past and the present. What is lost in translation between these different states? And how, these poems ask, can we preserve the best parts of each, even as we leave certain worlds-our childhood, our parents, even our homeland-behind?

Remember the Flowers is Enni Harlan's first book, a memoir in the form of poetry, written when she was 14. It won Stone Soup's 2021 Book Contest.