Poetry. The rhythmically grounded, formally varied poems of Lisa Rosenberg's second collection invite possibilities of kinship and transformation in the dichotomies that surround us, whether fantastic or ordinary, subatomic or cosmic in scale: odes to Pi and snowflake formation; meditations on urchins and orbital mechanics, and an interwoven series of uncanny prose poems for resilient plants. Weeds and Stars brings into deeper bloom what Robert Pinsky hailed in Rosenberg's debut: poetry "with an informed vision that is social as well as scientific, personal as well as historical." Weeds and Stars engages with the tropes and expectations of Western lyric poetry, and the speaker that emerges is by turns wry, off-kilter, and playful, inviting us to reconsider agency and interconnectedness-feather to fire, plants to politics, Old Glory to accretion disks.
Says Ariel Francisco Henriquez Cos, judge of the 2025 Hilary Tham Capital Collection, "From the celestial to the ground beneath our feet, from supernovas and nebulas to dandelions and the beautiful mundanity of the everyday, Weed and Stars houses us in the living herbarium of its vibrant poetry."
Katherine Larsen says: "In an age of velocity and vanishing attention, Rosenberg's poems offer a lucid countercurrent-an herbarium of the manifold world, tenderly pressed and reanimated through language. Fragrant, kindred, and artfully precise, Weeds and Stars gathers the resilient and the overlooked alike: chamomile, urchins, minor moons, and more-each rendered strange and radiant, remaking what we think we know of belonging, of wildness, of worth. Ecologically lush and captivating, Weeds and Stars travels from our galactic center to seabeds and suburban interiors, reminding us of poetry's power to reawaken wonder in a wounded world."
And Rebecca Foust praises: "These exquisitely calibrated poems offer a surprising combination of artistry and nature, as well as the artistry found in nature, to convey tentative hope for the future. Along with the ravages of climate change, we are reminded that wildfire fosters germination of seeds, and pandemic darkens a world that also includes blossoms and seasons and skies utterly unaffected by contagion. A series of deft and concise 'Herbarium' prose poems reminds us that while we tend to see plants in terms of their usefulness to us, they exist independently, able to survive without us and sometimes despite our worst meddling. Rosenberg's skillful use of form-pantoum, villanelle, abecedarian and more-mimics nature's wild patterning and gives us a way, perhaps, to chart a path through our chaotic times. I highly recommend this book to help us all."
Lisa Rosenberg is a poet and former space program engineer whose work explores the systems and shared tools of arts and sciences. She served as Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and has been recognized by a Djerassi Residency and Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Her debut collection, A Different Physics, received an American Legacy Book Award.
