“This collection of poems, written during a Synonym Art Consultation residency, is art-making at street level, with eyes on the overstory of an old elm tree in Winnipeg. This is poetry contributing to green with community-driven foliage. And this is how poetry can move, in the wind and rooted, at a time on our planet when trees can use more attending to. That these poems started out as leaves can be felt in the reading. There is a vitality to this work that is verdant. The poems read as if they are still outside, golden-houred. Ariel Gordon has curated a space for herself and for her community in the company of an elm. And we are the fortunate recipients of a collection to share, to read aloud, for the tree of it.”
–Sue Goyette

“Ariel Gordon, truly the Jane Jacobs of trees and poetry, has charmed a multitude of strangers and passersby to sing small songs to the urban canopy, to whisper their secrets and confessions to a neighbourhood elm tree. The result is Tree Talk, a celebration of the city-dweller’s relationship with trees, but also an elegy to the stress and devastation imposed on urban nature in the course of “growing” and developing a city. In Tree Talk, Ariel Gordon not only re-foliates a tree with poems, she adds a startling and crucial layer of leaves to how we might (re)imagine ourselves coexisting with nature.”
–Sylvia Legris