Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota is a near-future poetry collection, set roughly 20 years from now in a world where our climate has gotten worse and the invasive species currently living in Minnesota have also gotten worse.

There's a lot to like in this collection, from great depictions of plants and animals to the hints at what the world has become in twenty short years. There are some poems, though, that feel like they're about watching grass grow.

While there are some gems in the first part of the collection (Mute Swan, for example), the collection really picks up at poem #15, Sea Lamprey. The last seven poems are all pretty special.

All in all, if you're into plant poetry, climate poetry, or like poetry and are from the upper Midwest, or better yet, Minnesota, this is a short and sweet collection that's worth your time.

An ecological disaster has thrown the world into chaos. As invasive flora and fauna encroach upon the locals, Amelia Gorman’s narrator documents the collapse of civilization. The imagery is lush, the ideas clever and executed well, poems such as Curly-leaf Pondweed and Queen Anne’s Lace are deliciously creepy. Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota: Poems is a natural fit with the novels of Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel, although the reader will be left wishing each poem was a novel in it’s own right.

I'm not sure how to feel about this one! In many ways I loved it, and in many other ways it left me a little cold. Gorman's use of language is beautiful and every poem is obviously very carefully crafted, not a single word wasted, which is a nice contrast to a lot of the more raw and unedited poetry that we tend to see these days (which is its own separate art form and in no way inferior!) I really loved some of the poems in here, particularly the first one, Brittle Naiad, but then others just didn't really resonate with me at all, perhaps because I didn't have a reference point for them, living halfway across the world and being entirely unfamiliar with the organisms she was writing about. I actually read the Author's Note first and I feel like this helped to give necessary context to the writing, but I wish that hadn't been necessary; without that context, a lot of the poems really didn't mean a lot to me.

I did really like the sci-fi / dystopian element that Gorman wove into the natural world, and thought this was particularly effective when she didn't make it explicit that the poems were set in the future. I liked the duality of the poems that could either be set in our time and our world, or on another planet entirely; for me, those best encapsulated the inherent oddity of nature, and really brought home the alien characteristics of many of the things we consider normal.

This is a strong collection of poems by a writer I'll definitely be looking into in the future, and I really do think that its main drawback is also its biggest strength; it's just so niche that there are going to be some people who absolutely adore it, but for those of us who are coming to it without the weight of pre-existing knowledge, it's not the most accessible.

An interesting focus of having poems written about invasive species of bugs and plants in Minnesota. I like the premise idea concept, but the poetry itself was not my favorite. Still though, worth the read, and would be great in a classroom setting.

As someone who works in forestry, I thought this collection would be uniquely interesting to me. And I was right! The species selected are both familiar and not, as I'm in the Pacific Northwest rather than Minnesota, but I think the language used to describe (and reimagine) these species make them all approachable. I will admit that the poems were a bit wordy at times, but that's only based on my personal taste.

I think I would've enjoyed a follow up in the final pages that included a description of how all of the species became invasive. Some where explained in the author's notes on her life and experiences leading to these poems, but others weren't discussed. The information isn't necessary to the poetry collection - I just think it would've been nice.