Green Tea Chai & The Wonder of Small Things edited by James Crews
From the publisher:
As James Crews writes in the introduction: "Wonder opens our senses and helps us stay in touch with a humbling sense of our own human smallness in the face of unexpected beauty and the delicious mysteries of life on this planet."
The anthology features a foreword by Nikita Gill and a carefully curated selection of poems from a diverse range of authors, including Native American poets Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Kimberly Blaeser, and Joseph Bruchac, and BIPOC writers Ross Gay, Julia Alvarez, and Toi Derricotte. Crews features new poems from popular writers such as Natalie Goldberg, Mark Nepo, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, and Jacqueline Suskin, along with selections from emerging poets.
Readers are guided in exploring the meaning and essence of the poems through a series of reflective pauses scattered through the pages and reading group questions in the back. This anthology offers the perfect intersection for the growing number of readers interested in mindful living and bringing poetry into their everyday lives.
Read The Wonder of Small Things
(or stop by our Santa Fe store to pick up a copy!)
Our pairing:
This chai blend has a green tea base instead of black tea. Spicy-sweet and with a touch of citrus, Green Tea Chai blends green tea leaves with lemongrass, cinnamon, coriander, fennel, cumin, and cardamom for a flavorful twist on a traditional chai.
Apples to Oranges Herbal Tea & Collected Poems of Wendy Cope
From the publisher:
Cope has continued to delight her readers while finding a whole new generation of enthusiasts through her poem "The Orange". Together these poems catalogue the desires and fears that underlie our ordinary existences - love and heartbreak, disappointment and a hard-won capacity to find happiness, even if only in the form of a poem. In their profound attention to and encapsulation of the everyday, these poems serve to make our own lives the more remarkable and memorable. Collected Poems celebrates a lifetime's achievement by a poet who has been original and distinctive from the very start, and provides the perfect accompaniment to the trials, tribulations and joys of our all too human lives.
Read Collected Poems of Wendy Cope
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.
Himalayan Spring & If Not, Winter by Sappho, trans. Anne Carson
From the publisher:
Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sappho’s fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electric—or, to use Sappho’s words, as “thin fire ... racing under skin.”
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. This tea is smooth and buttery, with no hint of bitterness.
Winter Forest Green Tea & Our Hands Hold Violence by Kieron Walquist
From the publisher:
Through encounters with the everyday beauty and brutality so much a part of rural and urban Missouri, Our Hands Hold Violence explores what it means to experience and/or perpetuate small and significant acts of violence, toward others and the self.
What does it mean to hunt (be hunted), haunt (be haunted), and other (be othered)? Abiding by a chronological arc told in four movements (HERE, THERE, TOGETHER, ALONE), Our Hands Hold Violence follows the speaker(s) as they come up in the Show Me State and come to terms with queerness, mental disability, addiction, and loneliness in the largely Christian, conservative, and hyper-masculine landscape. Other themes/aspects of note include familial dynamics, estrangement, labor, neglected and decaying natures, waste, and the confluence of wildlife and mankind.
Our pairing:
Winter Forest blends green tea leaves with orange, almond, and pink peppercorn. This enchanting blend of fruits and spices is delicious in winter and year-round.
Atomic Gold Herbal Tea & The Afterlife of Sweetness by Jaia Hamid Bashir
From the publisher:
Jaia Hamid Bashir’s debut collection, The Afterlife of Sweetness, searches for beauty in waste and for mercy in defiance of a Muslim American girlhood. Haunted by lost lovers, Islamic theology, Hindu and Greek epics, and fractured selves, these poems trace the erotic contours of belief and the hungers that shape our becoming. They move among abandoned mining towns, gas stations, Qur’anic caves, suburbia, the American West, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—braiding myth with memory and eros with rot to dissect what remains after the beloved has vanished. Dogs, oysters, deer, goats, and maggots appear as traveling companions; neon signs hum beside Lorca, Celan, and the Mahabharata. Throughout these journeys, Bashir exhorts us to confront sites of both the profane and the sacred and asks: How do we endure love, dissipation, and time? Recalling the work of Kaveh Akbar, Frank Stanford, Rumi, and Jorie Graham, The Afterlife of Sweetness is both pilgrimage and detour, never veering from its insistence that holiness is not elsewhere but here.
Read The Afterlife of Sweetness
Our pairing:
Bashir suggests enjoying her collection along with a cup of turmeric tea with date syrup! Our Atomic Gold blends turmeric with ginger, licorice root, lemongrass, and lemon and orange peel for a deep, richly flavored herbal tea with a touch of citrus and spice.
Fine Ti Kuan Yin Oolong & Brine Orchid by Arah Ko
From the publisher:
“I have decided to be happy/ in spite of everything that came before,/ and because of it,” declares the speaker in BRINE ORCHID. Weaving in and out of myth, scripture, and immigrant family lore, the poems in Arah Ko’s spectacular debut create a tribute to Korean diaspora, the inheritance of storytelling, and the enduring survival of lineage that is both searing and tender. The collection traces the contours of Korean American heritage and its intersections with trauma, spirituality, colonialism, food, gender, and the natural world. By calling on figures of the past, these poems are permeated with a sense of absence and questioning both in form and content. While the writer’s immigrant family tends to live in the present as a method of survival, this poetry turns to history in order to mourn loss and wounds, acknowledge change, and celebrate the endurance of familial love and culture.
Our pairing:
Fine Ti Kuan Yin is an oolong tea with a distinctive and highly-prized orchid-like flavor. The tightly rolled olive green leaves brew up into a burnt gold liquor with a floral character and a hint of sweetness.
Lemon Cream Rooibos & in the aftermath by Jessica Nirvana Ram
From the publisher:
We know the power of poetry in the wake of unimaginable loss, and with her signature lyrical warmth, Jessica Nirvana Ram amplifies it tenfold. in the aftermath reveals to us the particular alchemy that comes from adorning your grief with tenderness and levity. With disciplined, tight lines, Ram invites us to partake of sunny river afternoons streaked with pink hair dye and french fry grease. As the speaker recalls her beloved college companion, she reckons with the im/materiality of grief like “a quiet child tugging at the hem of [her] shirt.” These poems affirm how the written word allows us to immortalize, forever preserving plates of eggplant parm and late night chats in an idling car. In this tribute, Emma stays with us, twirling forever in a yellow circle skirt.
Our pairing:
Lemon Cream Rooibos is a cup of yellow sunshine. This rooibos blend has the enticing aroma of lemon chiffon cake, with citrus and buttery notes.
Solstice Spice Black Tea & Eros Rex by Haley Hodges
From the publisher:
In this stunning debut collection, Haley Hodges probes the carnal aspects of Incarnation with unflinching honesty, disarming wit, and consummate craftsmanship. In poems that are both fierce and tender—often at the same time—Hodges considers how the hungers of the body and the hungers of the soul are so often present and noshing at the same table. Augustine knew this; so did Flannery O'Connor, and, more recently, poets like Anne Sexton, Marie Howe, and Kim Addonizio, and the poems in Eros Rex fit comfortably in this lineage. What makes them unique is the stark mirror of self-examination Hodges holds up to her subject: the remembrance—part sacred, part profane—of a profound consummation, in poems marked by anguish, resilience, and arresting beauty.
Our pairing:
Solstice Spice blends black tea with apple, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, orange slices, and pink pepper. A classic spiced tea!
Rose Petal Raspberry Herbal Tea & Avail by Erin O'Luanaigh
From the publisher:
In Avail, Erin O'Luanaigh's breathtaking debut poetry collection, the young poet charts her life during and after its transformation by illness.
Avail features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil—from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death—which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet’s blood disorder.
Our pairing:
Rose Petal Raspberry blends rose petals, raspberry, hibiscus, lemon peel, rosehips, and apple for a silky, aromatic tea that's fruity, tart, and refreshing. While this herbal infusion is excellent hot, it truly shines when served as an iced tea.
White Peony White Tea & The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Matthew Tuckner
From the publisher:
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend’s illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief — how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble — but also in joining the discrete experience of one person’s sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.
Read The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire
Our pairing:
White Peony consits of both buds and leaves that are air dried after harvesting.
This subtle white tea has a floral aroma and velvety taste.
Green Tea Citrus & In Gorgeous Display by Ugochukwu Damian Okpara
From the publisher:
In Gorgeous Display, by Nigerian poet Ugochukwu Damian Okpara, is a volume dedicated to the memory of those lost to anti-queer violence in Nigeria and elsewhere. In this first full-length collection of his work, Okpara examines queer male identity, effeminacy, and exile, offering meditations on desire and sanctuary, freedom and estrangement. Forty-three poems pierce familial relationships, safety, fear, and anxiety portrayed through the outward sign of hand tremors, queer lynching, survival, hope, the emptiness of exile, and reclamation of the self. Embracing the ephemeral and spiritual nature of physical beauty, Okpara also reveals the scars of queer displacement, illuminating the ways that leaving home is never quite the utopia one hopes for and how often the ache of abandonment can haunt a life lived in the present.
Our pairing:
Green Tea Citrus is a twist on a traditional Earl Grey, combining green tea leaves with bergamot, lemon peel, and orange blossoms for a smooth and citrusy blend.
Egyptian Chamomile & The Sailing Place by Kelly R. Samuels
From the publisher:
Burdened by the interior space, requisite tasks, and a stubborn despair, the woman in The Sailing Place craves release.
In short, lyrical poems, Samuels has the speaker share what she has become all too familiar with: tedious conversations about wallpaper, spilled tea, an untidy desk. Underlying this mundanity is a menace, some felt threat that can only be excised, or briefly forgotten, by removing herself to the natural world.
Mucking in the garden, a walk along a shore or a tramp up a coulee road, delicate alyssum—these offer her a reprieve and joy, a place where “the sharp snap of canvas takes.”
Our pairing:
Our Egyptian Chamomile is characterized by large, fragrant chamomile flower heads, and brews up into a lovely gold-colored infusion, with a mellow natural sweetness and notes of straw, honey, and apples.
Green Rooibos with Blossoms & Breaking Into Blossom ed. Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone
From the publisher:
Breaking into Blossom gathers modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem: endings that crescendo and exhort, double back or taper down, those that reverse expectation, embody paradox, or enact their logic in their formal DNA. In their introductory craft essay, co-editors Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment. Finding fracturing points in their own conversation while considering the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different kinds of endings, the editors consider such questions as the value of epiphany, what kinds of endings might be likelier to be commodified, how the poem and the mind keep going beyond the page, and more. Hankins and Stone also offer a taxonomy of ending types to think with. This groundbreaking anthology includes poems about mystery, love, dread, cruelty, violence and war; poems of motherhood; of disability; of masculinity; of queerness; of baldness. Poems of transforming bodies and Black joy and failure and hope. The poems sometimes break into blossom; other times, they just break. Or they leave us in wonderment with their quiet buds unfolding into the world.
Our pairing:
This flavorful blend combines green rooibos with rose petals, blueberries, sunflower petals, and cornflower petals for a light, floral, fruity herbal tea. Green Rooibos with Blossoms also makes an excellent iced tea.
Kabusecha Green Tea & Everything is Water by Chelsea Kreig
From the publisher:
Everything Is Water is an open letter to caregivers as the speaker grapples with her partner’s life-threatening illness, pregnancy and new motherhood, and marriage. Growing up on the Virginia coast, the speaker knows the water’s danger and allure—asks, what is beneath, what has control in so much open and unknown space? The speaker continues to feel this unease in everything as she navigates fear, identity, and loss. Everything is water. Everything is the surface tension created by the unknown. The collection often returns to the water and those inhabiting it, but it also looks to winged creatures, those on land, and those who are in between elements as they wrestle with their own survival. Water is an element that sustains and devours. When danger comes, we wonder when it will end. We ask how we can live with loss. Is it easier to run away? To let go? Everything Is Water leaves the reader suspended, treading water alongside the speaker as she seeks to answer these questions.
Our pairing:
We once heard Kabusecha described as "for those who long for the sea." This shade-grown tea has oceanic notes and a lingering sweetness. The deep, viridescent green leaves brew up into a beautiful straw-colored liquor, with hints of emerald.
Lapsang Souchong Black Tea & The Near and Distant World by Bianca Stone
From the publisher:
In her latest, brilliant collection, Bianca Stone continues to explore and interrogate the full spectrum of life, from an unexpectedly intimate conversation with an internet technician in Brooklyn, to a deep dive into Greek mythology, psychoanalysis, and modern philosophy. “I am thinking of what it means to be alive in this world,” Stone muses, “I want to get it not right but near.” With her signature incisive perspective, Stone debates the paradoxes of finding one’s own self amid parenthood, global change, and the constant press of mortality.
In these fifty-one poems, Stone seamlessly ties together allusions to Jordan Peele’s Nope, Rilke’s elegies, and other cultural touchstones to arrive at new revelations. With fluidity and wryness, she brings readers to the brink of psychic wounds, operatic dramas, and strange dreams, with a fresh narrative in the rich mytho-poetic tradition.
Read The Near and Distant World
Our pairing:
Our 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. Stone recommends enjoying this tea black, with a generous amount of honey!
Sing Your Song Herbal Tea & Mele by Kalehua Kim
From the publisher:
Mele, by Kalehua Kim, embodies the meaning of the word “mele” – a Hawaiian song or chant traditionally used to preserve history through the oral tradition. Winner of the Trio House Press Editor’s Choice Prize, Kim’s debut collection evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self, as well as the grace and generosity of healing, acknowledgement, and commemoration. The poems reflect on what we inherit and how who we become is intertwined with who our parents were and are, and the pain of facing that reality: “One day your voice will become mine,Ka leo o maua/Though I am not prepared for your end…” With this mele, Kim honors the memory of a lost mother, as well as the struggles of a daughter as she becomes a wife and mother herself, while honoring her roots and forging a new path.
Our pairing:
Warm and nourishing, Sing Your Song blends peppermint, ginger, cardamom, licorice root, and lemongrass.
Butterfly Blue Pea Flower & The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
From the publisher:
A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of “Miss You" poems opening a portal to all those we've lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi's latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi's own figure is examined—investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence—those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. “The days I don't kill myself are extraordinary" one poem says. “Why don't we have a name for it?" Lyrical and unafraid, The New Economy invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.
Our pairing:
Sometimes called blue tea, Butterfly Pea Flower brews up a brilliant blue color. It has a floral, mildly sweet flavor, somewhat similar to that of chamomile. Add a squeeze of citrus to turn this tea purple.
Leaf Pu-erh & I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken
From the publisher:
It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one’s life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns’s shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.
Our pairing:
Leaf Pu-erh is a rich, smooth aged tea, with notes of smoke, earth, and mushrooms.
Santa Fe Sage Black Tea & Into the Hush by Arthur Sze
From the publisher:
Like wind on a lake, U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and man. Drawing on a craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age—endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change—exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling against anthropocene, to “make lines/against a void.” Here poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrastic, epistle and twin pantoums. Poems borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Writing at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence. Repeatedly we find cause for praise.
Our pairing:
Arthur Sze hails from Santa Fe, so we're pairing him with Santa Fe Sage! Santa Fe Sage combines Lapsang Souchong black tea, Nilgiri black tea, anise seed, juniper berries, white sage, and cinnamon for an intensely aromatic, slightly smoky tea that embodies the spirit of Santa Fe.
Caramel Pu-erh & The Book of Alice by Diamond Forde
From the publisher:
When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice, she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text.
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.
Blueberry Pomegranate & Memorial by Alice Oswald
From the publisher:
In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad--the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen--in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer's glance. The resulting poem is a war memorial and a profoundly responsive work that gives new voice to Homer's level-voiced version of the world. Through a mix of narrative and musical repetition, the sequence becomes a meditation on the loss of human life.
Our pairing:
Blueberry Pomegranate blends blueberry, pomegranate, apple, and hibiscus for a delightfully fruity, naturally caffeine-free blend. Delicious hot, this also makes an excellent iced tea!
Valencia Verde Green Tea & Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert
From the publisher:
There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.
Read Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert
Our pairing:
Valencia Verde blends green tea leaves with lemongrass, jasmine, rose, lime, orange, and tangerine for a bright, floral, and citrusy green tea. Think summer blossoms and the scent of citrus on a sea breeze.
Chimayo Chai Black Tea & Book of Potions by Lauren K. Watel
From the publisher:
Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions capture a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.
By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.
Our pairing:
Our Chimayo Chai includes 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.
Sencha Green Tea & The Essential Haiku trans. Robert Haas
From the publisher:
This definite collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century.
Robert Haas has written a lively and informed introduction, provided brief examples by each poet of their work in the halibun, or poetic prose form, and included informal notes to the poems. This is a useful and inspiring addition to The Essential Poets series.
Our pairing:
From Shizuoka on the Fujiyama mountain slopes, our Sencha is a classic example of a Japanese green tea. Sencha is one of the most popular green teas in Japan, and for good reason. This tea has a medium body and brews up into a pale green-gold liquor, with citrus and oceanic notes.
Raspberry Orange Rhapsody Green Tea & Wildness Before Something Sublime by Leila Chatti
From the publisher:
Leila Chatti’s Wildness Before Something Sublime confronts a world defined by dualities—love and loss, wonder and despair, the gift of “sunflowers / by the roadside” and the pain of losing a pregnancy. “Night Poems,” written on the brink of sleep, travel the dream world and the subconscious mind to unearth the unfiltered self, to understand identity, desire, and the body. Other poems become acts of divination, calling on God and the Muse, calling on the voices of beloved women poets—Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, C.D. Wright—to comb through the dark. Chatti expertly grapples with the pain of what a body should but cannot do. Under the shifting weight of this grief, poems fragment, become ruptures of language, experimentations, refractions, a kaleidoscope of recurring sound and image. Snow, light, milk, clouds, silence. Behind every positive image, the shadow of its opposite, an echo of emotion. As Chatti bridges the gap between dream and language, the external and internal, a new world emerges—a world in which darkness is reclaimed.
Read Wildness Before Something Sublime
Our pairing:
This mellow green tea blends sweet raspberry and tart orange for a fragrant, delicious tea that will have you waxing rhapsodic.
Miss Violet Purple Tea & Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones
From the publisher:
“Violence is a failure of communication” opens this book as an omen and foregrounds a family exiled from Eden. In I.S. Jones’s stunning and evocative debut collection, Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose care for each other becomes increasingly fraught–the siblings vicious as they vie for the attention of a negligent father. Parallel to this, their bodies budding within and against the still-forming landscape, the girls navigate the shame of Eve’s sin while coming into their own sexuality.
Grounded in the remote natural world, enclosed by firs and redwoods, Bloodmercy follows Cain and Abel through the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood. Along the way, they discover the limits of power and control, spite and sex, faith and death, and man’s dominion over the earth. Found in the space between the Old Testament and the modern world, the girls gaze heavenward and pose enduring questions to God. Lyrical, lush, and bursting with tender imagination, Bloodmercy marks a debut to watch.
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.
Summer Romance Black & Green Tea & Love Prodigal by Traci Brimhall
From the publisher:
Fiercely self-aware and “utterly present tense,” Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift—the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. In conversation with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear throughout the collection; its metaphor promises an easy and endless cycle of rebirth—a forever life, forever alone. Brimhall rejects this idea, instead reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing.
Our pairing:
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!
Milk Oolong & In the Middle Distance by Linda Gregg
From the publisher:
In one poem in this emotional and spiritual collection, Linda Gregg asks, "It is clear why love / took me to the shore of death, / but why did it bring me back?" In the Middle Distance, Gregg's sixth book, explores up to and beyond the crossroads of devastation and desire. There, Gregg find not only survival but also salvation—hard won, resilient, and meaningful. This collection brings Gregg's passion and intensity together with a new wisdom and vitality that is unmistakably original.
Our pairing:
Milk Oolong's hand-rolled leaves are a rich olive-green color and brew up into a beautiful golden liquor. This relatively new cultivar of tea has a distinctive mellow, buttery flavor.
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!
Tea Sampler Gift Pail & The Norton Anthology of Poetry
From the publisher:
With 1,871 poems and 355 poets, The Norton Anthology of Poetry is a diverse and flexible core text. No other poetry anthology offers such abundance, which is why students hold onto their anthology long after the course ends; it is their poetry reference for life.
Read The Norton Anthology of Poetry
Our pairing:
Can't decide on a favorite poet or tea? Read (and sample) a little bit of everything with this doorstopping anthology and our Tea Sampler Gift Pail, which contains 20 different samples of loose leaf tea.