In an age of macro-analysis and immense emphasis on the effect of human activity on the anthropocene and the environment at large, Renée M. Sgroi — who holds a PhD in Education from U of T — is bringing our attention to the micro-relations between humans and the natural world. Sgroi returns with her new poetry collection, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, published with Guernica Editions in October 2024.
In this collection, Sgroi explores the complex intersections between the natural and human worlds, particularly where violence in human-nature interactions coexists — and even intertwines — with care, compassion, and love. While one might come to this collection expecting the typical anthropomorphism — the attribution of human traits to nature — of nature writing, Sgroi’s nuanced attention to these tensions, conveyed through the voices of a garden, defies categorization by creating an evocative negative space.
As Sgroi tends her garden, she moves beyond mere botanical observation, reflecting on the interplay between care and dominance. She raises profound questions about how cultures rooted in love and compassion can also benefit from and perpetuate violence — and how violence is subtly inherited alongside love.
Sgroi described her collection in an interview with The Varsity as a meditation on the peculiar experience of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. “We were dealing at that time with that kind of containment,” she explained. “In looking at the garden, I just started to realize that the possibilities were there, […] and for good or bad, COVID-19 forced upon us some degree of observation.” Viewing the garden as a kind of “container,” in the way that one’s home became a human container during the worst of the pandemic, Sgroi reflects on the garden as a space fraught with contradictions.
In the poem “Topiary,” Sgroi wrote, “the way we landscape selves / into globes, fanciful rabbits, / prune ourselves to fit.” While we care for and tend to the garden to escape the real world, this care is undercut by a sense of control — governance, the form of dominance most intimately reflected in the nationwide lockdown. Here, the populace is tended to like an orchard or flowerbed; pruned, weeded, and tilled to meet the arbitrary expectations of a higher authority.
This tension introduces another: while a gardener may weed and prune trees, the natural world inevitably reasserts its autonomy. Beetles arrive again, weeds reappear, and the cycle of dominance and care continues. In the poem “carpenter ants,” Sgroi wrote about them eating into a wooden fence. In “invasion,” she focuses on the grotesque image of an ant’s monstrous head: “its horror / maw menaced by yellow hairs.” In “earth,” the persona complains about the earth exacting a kind of revenge on humanity for contaminating it; “evening brings the rain / of corrosive lakes / … of murderous chemicals.”
In several poems about birds, titled “visitations,” Sgroi performs a “ritual of bearing witness” to the ungraspable mystery of nature’s randomness and its winged subjects. By recognizing that we are all visitors in the garden — just as the birds are — humanity is reminded of its subjection to “a world that continues its exertions, regardless of our presence” or our notions of ownership and control.
In this, Sgroi creates sequences of randomness using bird names, disrupting their Latin classificatory language — “splitting their binomial names into retroreflective signs, rendering them airborne” — and incorporating English, Italian, Calabrese, and Anishinaabemowin. This evokes a sense of human smallness and insignificance against nature’s vast forces, earthly power, and enduring mystery.
Rather than serving as a moral critique of gardening, it reminds us that the garden is a fragile privilege — a space we must protect by ensuring we do not destroy the very Earth that sustains us. This raises a deeper philosophical question: do we control the garden, or does the garden, through its quiet resilience and enigmatic power, ultimately exert control over us?
The collection is also compelling in its subversion of the traditional association between femininity and the Earth. Sgroi intentionally avoids traditional essentialist readings of the garden as female topography — a perspective that reduces the subjectivity of both women and the Earth to passive, unclaimed spaces to be dug into, fertilized, and harvested from. Instead, in her exploration of the feminine, Sgroi focuses on the nuanced intersections of womanhood, nature, and culture, offering a richer, more layered perspective.
In the poem “preserving tomatoes,” for example, the act of slicing tomatoes becomes a ritual imbued with cultural memory and familial intimacy, and complicated by violent imagery: slicing, digging out, bleeding, redness, blades, “techniques handed down / like a surgery.” The poem mirrors the larger duality and tension in the collection, where sacredness and violence coexist. It challenges the conventions of our approach to both the natural world and inherited traditions, while simultaneously celebrating the beauty found within them — beauty made all the more profound and difficult by the active presence of love.
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is a meditation on attention itself — an exploration of how we observe the world and ourselves, and why we do so. The titular poem plays on the double meaning of the word “attention,” interpreting it as both care and tension, to become the locus of the dualities that run throughout the collection. Sgroi’s words invite readers to pause, observe, and reflect. The collection challenges, unsettles, and ultimately enriches, reminding us that profound truths await us even in the smallest corners of our world.
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