Roots Grew Wild

In Roots Grew Wild Erica Hoffmeister tells the story of a Midwestern family through the perspective of the eldest daughter. Driving the telling in prose poetry is a crisp and distinct voice that lays bare relationships between mother and daughter, father and daughter, as well as the relationship between sisters. Roots Grew Wild is a quiet revelation of the often-harsh nuances the eldest daughter experiences as she comes of age. Themes of family are voiced through sharp imagery and terminology of botany-painting an enthralling psychological landscape that uncovers the layers of societal and familial relationships explored in Roots Grew Wild. Only by returning time and again to site of the narrator’s favorite tree as her father chops it down with her in it, do we begin to see the pivotal and retrospective symbolic memory essential to the collection of poetry as a whole.