lettuce lettuce please go bad is an incantation and a plea for transformation. Using the idea of compost as composition – since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life – the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing rituals, the cycles of the moon, experiences of stress and grief, and inherited and invented agricultural practices to tease out a poetics of rural embodied language. Situated at the moment when thought becomes image, lettuce lettuce please go bad expands on the author’s personal history of familial migration and agrarian labour – picking, pruning, grafting, tending, planting – entangled in issues of colonization, land manipulation, ownership, extraction, and food production. In an effort to think through the ways vegetables, fruits, and other foods can stand in for complex situations and emotions, La Melia reconsiders how value is allotted and advocates a return to love to mitigate both personal and collective crises.

Born in Italy and currently living on unceded Coast Salish territories, Tiziana La Melia is the author of Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writing (Publication Studio, 2015) and the chapbook Broom Emotion (2012). Recent solo and collaborative presentations of her work include The pigeon looks for death in the space between the needle and the haystack, LECLERE Centfare d’art (Marseille, 2017); Broom Emotion, galerie anne baurrault (Paris, 2017); Innocence at Home, CSA (Vancouver, 2015); and Johnny Suede, Damien and the Love Guru (Brussels, 2017). In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW (Toronto) and winner of the 2014 RBC Painting Competition Prize.Talonbooks published her The Eyelash and the Monochrome in 2018.

Tiziana La Melia's profile page