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  • Published: 20 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9780141999548
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99

Twelve Words for Moss




A celebration of the unsung hero of the plant word and an immersive journey through the British wetlands

Glowflake, Rocket, Small Skies, Kind Spears, Marilyn . . .

Moss is known as the living carpet but if you look really closely, it contains an irrepressible light. In Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett highlights this often forgotten but vital foundation of the plant world with her unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir. Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to Country Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy of these overlooked spaces, renaming her favourite species of moss as she recovers from grieving her father’s death, spurred on by the resilience and tenacity of her plant - and human - friends.

  • Published: 20 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9780141999548
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99

Also by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

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Praise for Twelve Words for Moss

A subtle, moving celebration of place and connectedness . . . The Grassling brings the sounds, smells and sights of the countryside alive like few other books. Burnett stretches the limits of prose, infusing it with poetic intensity to create a powerful, original voice . . . Her prose is both sinuous and knotty, stretching language to capture what is often beyond words, while slowing down the process of reading, allowing us to savour them

PD Smith, Guardian

Exquisite . . . needs to be savoured slowly, and then read again. Burnett is breaking new ground as a mixed-heritage English/Kenyan woman connecting so deeply to the historic land of her father's family in the West Country

Bernardine Evaristo

Praise for The Grassling

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With a blend of poetry, memoir and a uniquely experimental, sensory style of nature writing, The Grassling celebrates the lusciousness of both land and language ... Ideas that might in a lesser writer have seemed whimsical are grounded by the rich layers of Burnett's prose

Clare Saxby, TLS

Twelve Words for Moss is a fascinating, subtle and risk-taking book; its remarkable opening pages in particular dis-orient and re-orient the reader, readying us for the forms of attention-giving to the overlooked and undersung world of mosses which the rest of the book beautifully practices. Poetry, descriptive-evocative prose, memory, memoir, natural history and more all drift and mingle in strikingly new ways in Burnett's book, down at the "boundary layer" where this ancient, modest life flourishes so generatively

Robert Macfarlane

Exquisite, luminous and quietly radical ... so electric and so alive. It makes the world more beautiful and dimensional and vibrant - or moreso, it shows the world as it is to our moss-blind, weary eyes with a prose style that is utterly unique and refreshing ... I loved it

Lucy Jones

This accomplished writer's prose - filled with figurative and tactile imagery - and interspersed poetry powerfully join the human body, mind, and spirit with the Earth

The Countryman

A masterclass in the art of prose writing, and my favourite nonfiction book in a very long time

Sharon Blackie, author of If Women Rose Rooted

Hybridity (of form, subject) is what makes Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's work sing, beguile. Part poet, prose nature writer and woodland psychogeographer, her voice is her own

Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations: Reflections From Life

The poet Elizabeth-Jane Burnett has woven a bittersweet travelogue-cum-nature memoir… It thrums with loss.

The Sunday Times

In this luminous book, poetry and dreamy prose weave a strange kind of mossy magic. Taking the "most overlooked of life forms" as her inspiration, Burnett explores intriguing parallels between the lives of mosses and her own… This is an intense book that rewards careful reading. I took my time over it, absorbing a few pages and then letting the beautiful, unforgettable imagery soak in. Burnett is a unique voice and one of our most original nature writers

Ben Hoare, BBC Countryfile Best Nature Book of the Year
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