Crocosmia

Is there a way out? Mellis posits a miracle, a dream within, almost invisibled but not yet, of ecological and ethical wisdom and liberation. Crocosmia reminds us of the values we thought we had and, as its syncretic miracle blooms to show the way, could have again.

Imagine: a burning, flooding, warring planet where someone has kept their notebook open. They’ve been collecting ancient and natural recipes for revenge, written on mysterious linen woven of complex kinship, research, mythopoetics, collective action and love. If you’ve been fearing what follows if we survive the damage we humans have produced in our home, bury your phone in the compost for a week and read Crocosmia slowly: it will rearrange your heart and change your life.

I read Crocosmia hungrily, in a stretch of “stolen” hours, feeling both held and fueled by its articulations of complex political desire confronting the lack—so named by Lauren Berlant—of “genres for transition.” This utter gift of a book is soaked in intelligence, beauty, resistance, and loss; its blood is what spills when theory meets practice, its references help it breathe. Meanwhile, its sentences—like its characters—grow the genre they need.

What if art could save the world? What if all we had to do was let it? Two women, mother and daughter, move to the woods to escape dark forces that plague the mother’s dreams. What follows is an incisive and beautiful meditation on imagination and intention in the Anthropocene. An apocalypse narrative infused with hope and a domestic story that shines a light on our collective power, Crocosmia functions in conversation with Jenny Offill’s Weather and Debbie Urbanski’s After World while existing in a universe all its own. This novel is a revelation.

Wildly hopeful and ecstatic with language, Crocosmia offers a yearning, visionary dose of eschatological surrealism. With both care and verve, Miranda Mellis mixes poetry, philosophy, memory, and imagination to tell a story of intergenerational debts and obligations in the face of radical social transformation. Crocosmia glows in the night.

Miranda Mellis has written a philosophical novel with a metaphysical sense of humor. In it, we meet Jane, who thinks about everything, and her daughter Maya, who takes her place and continues to think. Crocosmia describes a certain way of love between a mother and daughter in which, above all, it is the capacity for thought that is handed down.