Lyrical and narrative-driven, with playful and fantastical elements woven throughout, the poems in The Infant Vine reflect on how ordinary moments become charged with significance and strangeness when disaster strikes. Such moments make imaginary worlds possible: sleep deprivation transfigures a new mother into a leafy sea dragon; a novel virus gives women the power to reproduce via parthenogenesis like the eponymous bonnethead shark. Themes of transformation, metamorphosis and preservation — of life, of memory and the environment — permeate this collection, which explores caregiving and creativity in the context of global crises.'In The Infant Vine, pregnancy, postpartum life and caregiving are inextricable from the contexts of creativity and ecological crisis. In the poet’s words, "the hard edge of a creative life is care—", and Isabella G. Mead shows herself to be a writer who cares profoundly for this world. Alert and curious, these exquisite poems form a language of remarkable movements and simultaneities, comprising clarity and complexity, precision and suggestion, tenderness and strength. Allusive and layered, spliced with humour and feeling, comfort and strangeness, Mead’s poetry illustrates with grace and fierce intelligence how "a poem is not a mirror — it responds".' — Jo Langdon
