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Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.
In Animism, Penny Wei transforms flowers and natural concepts into vessels of memory, piety, love, grief, and longing. Guided by the belief that all things possess a spirit, the collection moves through a garden of camellias, zinnias, primroses, poppies, and forget-me-nots, where blossoms become companions to daughters, lovers, mothers, friends, and ghosts. Through lush imagery and inventive lyricism, Wei explores the hidden lives of emotions — how love persists in ordinary objects.
Blending floriography with contemporary coming-of-age narratives, Animism examines family, migration, queer desire, friendship, and inheritance through a world alive with agency. Flowers listen; landscapes remember; even language itself becomes animate. Tender, intimate and mythic, these poems invite readers into a universe where the boundaries between human and nonhuman dissolve, revealing the spiritual threads that connect all living things.
Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. Her work appears in West Trestle Review, Inlandia Journal, and The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Her Other Fragile Inheritances (Glass Poetry Press, 2026) and Animism (Bottlecap Press, 2026).