Remember the Flowers

A tiny, overgrown garden. An empty parking lot. A white IKEA chair. The frozen food aisle in the supermarket. In this collection of narrative poems that span early childhood to the pandemic, Enni Harlan turns the landscapes and objects of everyday life into extraordinary ones-the overgrown garden becomes her own secret garden; the parking lot, a handball court; the IKEA chair, a steam train.

With her sharp, sometimes darkly comic eye, Harlan explores what it means to play and live in the in-between -in between buildings, but also in between the U.S. and South Korea, childhood and adulthood, the past and the present, reality and imagination. What can we hold onto, even as we leave certain worlds-our childhood, our parents, even our homeland-behind forever?

Remember the Flowers is Enni Harlan’s first book, a memoir in the form of poetry. It won Stone Soup’s 2021 Book Contest.