Sundress Reads: Review of Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian

An abecedarian poem is formatted using the sequential alphabet, beginning every new line with each successive letter; the familiar structure of the alphabet acts as a scaffold for communicating the poet’s message. In Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian (Newfound Press, 2024), Elissa Favero cleverly uses “this alphabet container” (66) to guide the reader through knowledge pathways that span generations. In a confluence of nonfiction prose and poetic expression, Favero explores an intricate weaving of personal familial history, ecology, and culture, particularly Indigeneity.

From the title, I knew Favero would be sharing knowledge about different flora and fauna. Favero details the durability of the birch tree, defines ecology terms such as “endogamy” and “maiden tree.” The first chapter, however, surprised me. “A for Ancestral Plant” opens with a brief history of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s relationship with plants. He kept a garden, collected seeds in the south of Italy, and sought out “the Urpflanze,” an ancestral plant that he believed contained “all possible future plants” (Favero 6). The remainder of this short opening chapter travels through Goethe’s 1790 scientific treatise about the Urpflanze to a 19^th century French illustrator who made a print of an Urpflanze, and ends with a 20^th century neurologist reflecting on his boyhood fascination with ferns. What Favero sets up in these two brief, but loaded, pages is a sense of history, legacy, lineage—and the ways knowledge is shared down the line.

Throughout Children of Rivers and Trees, Favero’s family story blooms with prose that is carefully, brilliantly, strung out like pearls on a string. In “B for Birch,” we learn of her Scottish roots, a great-grandmother from the town of Beith. Favero reflects on the etymology of Beith: “Beth, is associated with the birch tree. Beith, or birch: my own ancestral place, my own ancestral plant” (Favero 8). This interweaving of the natural and the personal persists as Favero continues spelunking her lineage, using ecology as a central framework to understand her findings.

As the book continues, the narrative opens up to explore how the stories we are told inform our understanding of the world—whether it be from our families, or society at large. It is easy to look back on our personal histories and paint our lineage in a romanticized light, but Favero, in her exploration of her family’s past, does not shy away from addressing the scar marks she finds there. She states, “I need to stay alert to the advantages and inequities from which my life has grown” (Favero 49). Favero also asks, “How do we account for ourselves?” (31), which is a direct nod to a larger question that the narrative as a whole poses: How do we grapple with the past that we had no part in shaping? How do we let this knowledge affect us, inform our understanding of our families, ourselves? The truth is a story passed down through generations—how do we take control of that, make sense of a new truth?

Favero’s interweaving of history with cultural notes and personal narrative is wonderfully organized, making for an engagingandinformative read. In addition to the beautifully wrought narrative, the structure of the book also shines. In several chapters, Favero breaks the standard form and wrangles the words into shapes that play into the story she is telling. For example, she creates a branch (or “branching shape”, as she calls it) with the word “dendriform” (Favero 14). The chapter “L for Long Lines Of” begins with a question: “How many generations does it take to make a line long—three, four?” (Favero 32). The answer starts, “I come from,” then the lines break and the words elongate dramatically, splaying letters across the page that puzzle into “drinkers, storytellers, mild eccentrics” (Favero 32-33). The text reads like hearing a person in real life conversation think about their answer and reply as the thought comes to them, with all of the hemming and hawing and natural pausing. Favero’s writing flows as clear as a mountain stream, carrying us easily down the river of her thoughts; she has crafted a gorgeous vessel to transport her stories safely into our hands.

With its invested appreciation of nature and contemplation of our place within the ecosystem, Children of Rivers and Trees takes its place beside Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, Shafak’s Island of Lost Trees, Oliver’s Upstream. In this era of seemingly wanton ecodestruction, Favero invites us to deeply engage with the world around us with an active, intentional eye. As she says, “[l]eaving to let grow is easy” (Favero 30), but the real effort—and, thus, the real reward—comes from taking the time to look at the situation carefully and pruning where needed in order to let the whole body flourish.

An abecedarian is a poetic format using the alphabet as a guide—but an abecedarian can also be defined as “a beginner, a novice.” We are all abecedarians in some aspect of our lives, a concept that can be intimidating to face. Favero encourages us to be open to learning, to understanding, to growing—from, and with, one another. We are like a vast network of trees: interconnected, reliant on each other for growth. To know our families, our communities, our world, and our very selves, we must be willing to engage with curiosity and open-mindedness.

Children of Rivers and Trees is available from Newfound Press

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Isabeau J. Belisle Dempsey (they/them) is a proud Chicagoan, Belizean, Lesbian, and Capricorn. They hold a BA in International Studies & Spanish and are currently earning an MA in English Literature & Publishing, and they hope to eventually put their obsession with commas to good use as an in-house editor. History book co-author, amateur poet, freelance copyeditor, and generally just along for the ride, you can find Isabeau in your local bookstore surreptitiously fixing the shelves—they were once a bookseller and never quite broke the habit.