Peach Rooibos Herbal Tea & Last Psalm at Sea Level by Meg Day
From the publisher:
"Lovely does not suffice, nor does lyric. Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as gold burning itself into light."
—Afaa Michael Weaver, Contest Judge
“The vivid impermanence of the body is like kindling catching, a source of fire for Meg Day, a poet whose fearless heart is tethered to the world. This is a commanding book and a portent for the vitality of poetry.”
—D.A. Powell
Our pairing:
Peach Rooibos blends green rooibos and red rooibos with peach bits, blackberry leaves, and calendula petals for a juicy, fruity tea that's like biting into a ripe peach.
Lapsang Souchong Black Tea & The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil
From the publisher:
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Bhanu Kapil's full-length collection of prose poems, is arranged using a series of twelve repeated questions, such as:
"How will you begin?"
"Describe a morning you woke without fear"
"Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?"
The manuscript is set in diverse places—Punjab, Central America, England, Arizona—where the meditations on the "interrogations" considered by the narrator are described in surprising, sensual language that is segmented and seeking.
Only at the end of the twentieth century could a writer create this compelling combination of experience and imagination, education and tradition, sex and prayer. This magic and modern coming of age could not have been written at any other time, yet its references bring the reader places that are distinctly not 1990s America.
Read The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
Our pairing:
Lapsang Souchong is a smoky, aromatic tea with a smooth, crisp character. Reminiscent of woodsmoke or even expensive cigars, this classic tea has a hint of natural sweetness.
Lavender Lullaby Herbal Tea & Dream Work by Mary Oliver
From the publisher:
In this collection of forty-five poems, originally published in 1986, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver turns her attention to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit, the parallel awe and destruction that is nature, and the great wonder and struggle of being. Including some of her most well-known poems, such as "Wild Geese" and "The Journey,"Dream Workdemonstrates the remarkable depth of perceptural awareness that underlies much of Oliver's writing. An expressive exploration of the world and how one fits within it, Oliver's collection is a rich but unflinching meditation on how to exist amid the darkness while always, tirelessly, bending toward the light.
Our pairing:
This blend of chamomile, lavender, roses, sweet orange peel, and calendula petals is sweet, floral, and soothing—a tea to keep you company through change and transition.
Butterfly Blue Pea Flower Herbal Tea & In Old Sky by Lauren Camp
From the publisher:
In Old Sky is a captivating poetry collection born out of Lauren Camp's residency as the fourth Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, promising readers an extraordinary journey through the depths of Grand Canyon and its iconic dark skies. In Old Sky marks a historic milestone as the first poetry book published by Grand Canyon Conservancy. Currently serving as the Poet Laureate of New Mexico, Camp spent an immersive month exploring the pristine natural darkness of Grand Canyon, delving into the night phenomena, and reflecting on the vast power emanating from the canyon. The collection includes vivid color photos capturing breathtaking landscapes from within the canyon to the cosmic wonders beyond. One of the highlights is an epic poem crafted from hundreds of responses by visitors during Camp's residency, creating a unique narrative of collective experience.
Our pairing:
Sometimes called blue tea, butterfly pea flower tea is made from the leaves and flower petals of the clitoria ternatea plant. Butterfly pea flower brews up a brilliant blue color when prepared as a tea, like the indigo color of twilight, just before the stars come out.
White Peony White Tea & After Image by Jenny George
From the publisher:
A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms.” A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George’s After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—” Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet’s persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief’s terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George’s sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.
Our pairing:
White Peony, also known as Bai Mu Dan, is a full-leaf white tea sourced from the Fujian Province of China. Consisting of both buds and leaves that are air dried after harvesting, this subtle white tea has a floral aroma and velvety taste.
Southern Sweet Tea with a Ceylon Base & Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola
From the publisher:
In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone…
Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: “if you never owned a bone-sharp biography… / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.”
Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.
Our pairing:
We're pairing Helen of Troy, 1993 with a Southern sweet tea with a base of hearty Ceylon. This rich, smooth, and highly aromatic black tea makes a brisk iced tea with just a hint of spice. Sweeten to taste!
Tuscan Sun Herbal Tea & My Heresies by Alina Stefanescu
From the publisher:
Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu’s poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush, at other times stark and shocking. My Heresies probes the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and the result is a hauntological mapping of life, love, family, and womanhood.
Our pairing:
Tuscan Sun blends linden blossoms, apple, lemon balm, lavender, rose petals, blackberry leaves, orange blossoms, and blue mallow blossoms for a light and floral blend.
Pacific Paradise Herbal Tea & Nonbinary Bird of Paradise by Emilia Phillips
From the publisher:
Nonbinary Bird of Paradise shakes its tail feathers, reveling in a body that cannot be contained in gender binaries. Its opening sequence re-imagines the Judeo-Christian Eve as a queer person who, instead of eating of the proverbial forbidden fruit, conjures a femme lover: “God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / SoI made a beloved / in mine,” she says. Eve’s power triggers a jealous God to manipulate Adam toward behaviors of toxic masculinity and to exile the two humans from the Garden of Eden. This retelling, accompanied by other retellings of classical and biblical narratives, indicts the ways in which religion and myth have created and buttressed compulsory heterosexuality. Elsewhere in the collection, Phillips delights in the autobiography of their imagination, the rendering of self after self after self. “Would you stay // & watch me,” Phillips asks in the titular poem, wondering if the beloved will deem them desirable, even though they are masculine without being a man, “even / though / I have no blue velvet / skirt or ruby-raw / throat?”
Read Non-Binary Bird of Paradise
Our pairing:
Pacific Paradise is a bright, fruity, caffeine-free blend that combines cherry, coconut, and kiwi. Pacific Paradise also makes an excellent iced tea!
Rose Petal Raspberry Herbal Tea & motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life by Destiny Hemphill
From the publisher:
“mama say this earth will outlive this world,” Destiny Hemphill writes, and in this gleaming collection she gathers what of this life might bloom into another. Through rituals, hymns, memories, murmurings, chants, and psalms, motherworld convenes the women and waters whose routes mark an otherwise from the brutal arrangements of the here and now. This transformative practice is not for the faint of heart. Toni Cade Bambara asks: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? . . . cause wholeness is no trifling matter.” And here is a poet who answers with a resounding yes—her affirmation a root system, fortified by all the nourishment of blood and earth.
Hemphill’s motherworld shimmers with that brightdark joy that is grief’s marrow. What luck and work to carry the instruction of these poems. I will be holding them close and pressing them into many hands.
— Claire Schwartz
Read motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life
Our pairing:
Rose Petal Raspberry blends rose petals, raspberry, hibiscus, lemon peel, rosehips, and apple for a silky, aromatic tea that's crisp, floral, and tart.
Kukicha Green Tea & Anchor by Rebecca Aronson
From the publisher:
Threaded with epistolary poems to Gravity—envisioned as a capricious god as the author's father began to fall frequently at the outset of a progressive illness—Aronson's latest poems contemplate and address what anchors us, literally and figuratively. These poems excavate grief during the process of losing parents, one to physical illness and the other to dementia. But even in the midst of grief, Aronson never loses sight of the larger world, ever present in all its danger and beauty.
Our pairing:
Kukicha is a Japanese green tea that is made from the stems and leaves of the tea plant. Kukicha has a sweeter, lighter flavor than other types of green tea.
Himalayan Spring White Tea & The Radiant by Lise Goett
From the publisher:
In The Radiant, Lise Goett renders a music whose profound reckoning is of the poet’s own determinations between a life of the mind and the physical world. The poems here orchestrate both the painful and rapturous particulars of a consciousness in the fires of transformation when faced, on the one hand, with individual mortality and demise; and on the other, with the fierce disquiet that haunts humanity given the slow-motion proximity of planetary extinction. The contradictory fears and desires that drive such understanding—capable of expressing the “distortions that arise from the experience of the body’s limitations and its abuse”—can account likewise for “bodies of all things being born into this world under a sign of error, / of negation, as they are being erased,” but not without the bliss of natural phenomena and language “caught in an updraft.”
— Roberto J. Tejada, author of Why the Assembly Disbanded
Our pairing:
The first leaves of the spring season are hand-plucked in the foothills of Nepal to produce this refreshing white tea. Himalayan Spring brews up into a pale, peachy straw color, and embodies the characteristic lightness and brightness of a spring harvest white tea.
Miss Violet Purple Tea & We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik
From the publisher:
To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six ruminative and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters.
Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and meditations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, We Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who “will not turn away from the ache of this world.” For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expansive idea of kinship—of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves.
Our pairing:
Miss Violet starts with a purple tea base, which is then blended by hand with butterfly pea flower, hibiscus, lemon peel, and lavender blossoms, for a mellow tea that brews into a vibrant violet color. This tea has a light body, with a subtle sweetness and floral and citrus notes.
Ginger Peach Black Tea & Earthly Gods by Jessica Nirvana Ram
From the publisher:
“Jessica Nirvana Ram’s Earthly Gods wrestles the angel of belief to our mundane sphere, incarnating as devotion to divinity and ancestors, shifting into a love wincing from the searing beauty of the world. From the tender renderings of a grandmother’s praying hands to incantations to the departed to the rivers that are the women throughout this book, these poems teem with diasporic wonderments and heartaches. Rituals described and deities invoked, Ram’s debut chants the sincerest ode of my own heart as the speaker prophesizes, “The marrow of your bones will sprout dandelions.” All I can see after reading this is a summer field filled with small petaled suns lifting up their heads from the green in praise.”
—Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria
Our pairing:
Peach and ginger are a winning combination in this fruit-forward, slightly spicy blend. This smooth black tea is bright and flavorful, and also makes an excellent iced tea.
Apples to Oranges Herbal Tea & Dream of the Unified Field by Jorie Graham
From the publisher:
In these pages we witness the maturation and evolution of a startling and searching poetic voice. The New York Times Book Review described Graham's first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, as announcing "a poet of large ambitions and reckless music."
With each succeeding book, she has enlarged the poems' reach and scope and sought out new thematic and stylistic territory. David St. John, writing in The Los Angeles Times, recognized that, with The End of Beauty and Region of Unlikeness, Jorie Graham "emerged as one of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets." And of Materialism, he said, "[her] speculative and sensual poetry... echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before."
To the sizable body of praise for her work, James Tate has added, "Jorie Graham is a poet of staggering intelligence. Her poems are constantly on the attack. She assays nothing less than the whole body of our history reshaping myth in ways that risk new knowledge, fresh understanding of all that we might hope to be."
Read Dream of the Unified Field
Our pairing:
Apples to Oranges combines apples, oranges, rose hips, and hibiscus for a bright, tart, fruity tea. This blend is great hot, and also makes an excellent iced tea on a warm summer afternoon.
Blueberry Pomegranate Herbal Tea & Deluge by Leila Chatti
From the publisher:
In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection’s themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.
Our pairing:
Blueberry Pomegranate blends blueberry, pomegranate, apple, and hibiscus for a delightfully fruity, naturally caffeine-free blend.
Solstice Spice & Master Suffering by CM Burroughs
From the publisher:
Master Suffering pendulates between yield and command; the bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething—they want nothing more than to survive. But how does a woman survive? One’s own healthy body helps, but illness is one of the masters of this book. Faith can be a salve for the inscrutable ailments of the body, but God is unreliable in these poems. The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; they want to control and to correct the suffering they witness and withstand.
Our pairing:
Solstice Spice blends black tea with apple, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, orange slices, and pink pepper for a classic spiced tea!
Earl Grey Lavender & The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies
From the publisher:
Rachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters chronicles the relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she loves.
Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi—and occasionally Naomi’s responses, as filtered through the speaker’s retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker’s personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences.
As the speaker discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and its stakes—a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short, but precarious distance.
Our pairing:
A classic cup of Earl Grey gets a makeover in Provence! This lovely blend of bergamot flavored black tea and lavender blossoms adds a soothing floral note to Earl Grey.
Cinnamon Pu-erh & Hard Damage by Aria Aber
From the publisher:
Hard Damage works to relentlessly interrogate the self and its shortcomings. In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. Drawing on material dating back to the 1950s, she considers the consequences of these relations—in particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorism—for her family and the world at large.
Invested in and suspicious of the pain of family and the shame of selfhood, the speakers of these richly evocative and musical poems mourn the magnitude of citizenship as a state of place and a state of mind. While Hard Damage is framed by free-verse poetry, the middle sections comprise a lyric essay in fragments and a long documentary poem. Aber explores Rilke in the original German, the urban melancholia of city life, inherited trauma, and displacement on both linguistic and environmental levels, while employing surrealist and eerily domestic imagery.
Our pairing:
Cinnamon Pu-erh combines dark, aged pu-erh tea leaves with cinnamon, ginger, and orange peel for a warming, restorative blend.
Midnight Rose Black Tea & Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
From the publisher:
Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.
Read Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Our pairing:
This rose black tea is a smooth tea with a medium body and floral notes. Midnight Rose features Chinese black tea with rose petals—a classic combo that results in an aromatic, flavorful cup with a sweet, floral character.
Rooibos Chai Herbal Tea & to cleave by Barbara Rockman
From the publisher:
Full of sensory detail and written with astute observation, to cleave searches for and lays bare the mythic moments one finds even in the most ordinary life. In this stunning collection Rockman explores the themes of aging; our relationships to our bodies; marriage; and the surprises, griefs, and joys of motherhood. Each of the seven sections urges readers to view their daily lives with renewed curiosity and wonder.
Our pairing:
Rooibos Chai blends traditional chai spices, including cinnamon, cardamom, ginger root, coriander, cloves and pepper, with South African rooibos for a caffeine-free version of chai.
Chimayo Chai Black Tea & the New Mexico Poetry Anthology
From the publisher:
New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023 is an "ode and homage to nuestra querencia, our beloved homeland." Two hundred original, previously unpublished poems explore themes such as community, culture, history, identity, landscape, and water. From a diverse group of poets, the poems are introspective and personal; reflective and astute; steady and celebratory.
Read the New Mexico Poetry Anthology
Our pairing:
When you’re in New Mexico, you quickly learn that chile is part of the culture here. Our Chimayo Chai honors that tradition by including just enough crushed red chile flakes in our chai tea to add the right amount of heat! Enjoy it in the classic way as a sweet, milky chai—or, if you’re brave, try it straight for a fiery cup.
Vanilla Velvet Black Tea & The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser
From the publisher:
By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Threa Almontaser’s incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. Half-crunk and hungry, speakers move with the force of what cannot be contained by the limits of the American imagination, and instead invest in troublemaking and trickery, navigate imperial violence across multiple accents and anthems, and apply gang signs in henna, utilizing any means necessary to form a semblance of home. In doing so, The Wild Fox of Yemen fearlessly rides the tension between carnality and tenderness in the unruly human spirit.
Our pairing:
Rich vanilla and a hint of floral jasmine give Vanilla Velvet its depth of character. Full bodied and with a natural sweetness, Vanilla Velvet is delicious on its own or with a splash of milk, and also makes an excellent iced tea.
Leaf Pu-erh & Dark Octaves by Frank Paino
From the publisher:
“Not since I sat down half a century ago on a bookstore floor with a paperback copy of Alan Dugan’s Poems have I been so astonished. Like the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand with its nine extra bass keys, Paino has a supernumerary octave up his sleeve that lends unparalleled depth to this collection.” – Roger Weingarten
“Frank Paino’s Dark Octaves is nothing less than epic, an existential odyssey, its protagonist a modern-day Prometheus suspended from a dystopian cliff. His poems are masterful, his language striking and edgy. From the martyrdom of St. Catherine of Siena and her holy anorexia to Icarus and his flight into the sun, from the miraculous metamorphosis of the luna moth to the knee on the neck of George Floyd, these poems startle, expose, and transmute their audience, ushering urgency and social responsibility.” —Rosa Lane
Our pairing:
This dark aged tea is rich and smooth, with notes of smoke, earth, and mushrooms.
Vanilla Rooibos & There Are As Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral by Elizabeth Jacobson
From the publisher:
As the title intimates, many distinct voices sing in this new collection by Elizabeth Jacobson, often expressing the complicated, rapidly fluctuating truths of our heating planet, family function and dysfunction, and the surprising reflections that emerge from a continuous practice of paying attention to the self, society and the greater wild world.
Read There Are As Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral
Our pairing:
Our Vanilla Rooibos is rich and sweet, with a full body and a smooth finish.
Caramel Pu-erh & The Pale Goth by Nicole Yurcaba
From the publisher:
Embark on a journey into the dusky realms of Nicole Yurcaba's "The Pale Goth," a poetic odyssey where shadows and hues entwine, revealing forbidden loves and apocalyptic whispers. Yurcaba's verses paint a haunting landscape, each poem a macabre revelation, unraveling the intricate dance of mortality, gratitude, and the transformative power of embracing the darkness.In this collection, she forges a poetic haven for those teetering on the edge of eternity, delving into the profound beauty found in cryptic depths and the echoes of gratitude resonating through the haunted corridors of the soul. "The Pale Goth" is a tribute to the shadows within, an elegy for the undead, and an exaltation of unconventional beauty nestled in the nexus of life and death.
Our pairing:
This dark, rich tea combines the sweet decadence of caramel with the earthy depth of flavor of an aged pu-erh to create something akin to dessert in a teacup.
Sing Your Song Herbal Tea & The Veiled Suite by Agha Shahid Ali
From the publisher:
Agha Shahid Ali died in 2001, mourned by myriad lovers of poetry and devoted students. This volume, his shining legacy, moves from playful early poems to themes of mourning and loss, culminating in the ghazals of Call Me Ishmael Tonight.
Our pairing:
This uplifting herbal tea is minty and bright, with notes of spice and citrus.
Summer Romance Black & Green Tea & Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham
From the publisher:
Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in Reader, I both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker—tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover—finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in Jane Eyre, a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, Reader, I traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.
Our pairing:
Let this magical blend carry you away like a summer of love. Sweet papaya, strawberry, black tea, and green tea come together in this sweet, fruity, intensely aromatic blend. Summer Romance also makes an excellent iced tea!
Nilgiri Black Tea & Gills by Ayomide Bayowa
From the publisher:
Gills is the debut collection of Ayomide Bayowa, the current Poet Laureate of Mississauga and a rising star in Canadian poetry. Born in Lagos, Bayowa found his path to poetry at the University of Ibadan, Oyo. He brings a diasporic sensibility to his writing, which is an intricate meshing of narrative voices, dramatic tellings and hip hop rhythms. These poems interrogate belonging, race, identity and the diasporic struggle with the socio-economic system of debt. They are written for the millions of immigrants trying to keep their head up, trying to uphold skin and breath and bones. They are poems written to enable people to survive, even under water.
Our pairing:
Nilgiri is a malty black tea with a full body, floral and fruity notes, and a hint of natural sweetness.
Lavender Mint Herbal Tea & 6 Lineage Poems by Fernando Trujillo
From the publisher:
6 Lineage Poems is a debut poetry collection rooted in the body and the world. Half the collection is lush and evocative, lingering in the sensuous. The other half sits in stillness and calm. There are poems that embody old lovers while looking forward to new ones, and there are poems that sit back to observe a lake, garden, or the sky. All in all, this collection is a little offering for the altar of poetic lineage, and it calls on poets from Li Bai to Megan Fernandes. “Make of me a song,” Trujillo states and implores. And make of himself a song, he does.
Our pairing:
One of our most popular herbal teas, Lavender Mint is a simple but satisfying herbal blend. Calming lavender blossoms complement cooling peppermint for a fresh, lightly floral cup that tastes great hot and makes a superb iced tea.
Daily Darjeeling Black Tea & The Body Problem by Margaret Wack
From the publisher:
The voice in Margaret Wack's remarkable debut chapbook is drenched in myth but also with the knowledge that all myths must fade in time, like every body, like every culture—like humanity itself. A vatic magnetism pulls the reader in as these poems reckon with impermanence and the impending end of the Anthropocene, but also unapologetically revel in the numinous viscerality of each present moment, insisting on making new songs to the end.
Our pairing:
Our second flush Darjeeling black tea has a medium body and a fresh, slightly nutty flavor. Daily Darjeeling features black tea leaves with green and gold highlights, and brews up into a beautiful pale amber color. The Body Problem was written by ArtfulTea's own Maggie Wack!