UNSOLICITED PRESS ANNOUNCES THE RELEASE OF BOSK BY AWARD-WINNING WRITER & TRANSLATOR PATRICK BARRON

Unsolicited Press is proud to release Bosk, a luminous and probing collection of short poems by writer, translator, and scholar Patrick Barron. Rooted in close observation of the Boston arboretum’s trees, shrubs, and understory species, Bosk brings language, perception, and the natural world into playful, resonant conversation.

The poems in Bosk were born from wandering the arboretum’s glacial drumlins, valleys, and meadows, in moments when a texture or shape tugged at the senses and asked to be noticed. These field encounters sparked a series of questions at the heart of the collection:
How does sustained attention to nonhuman beings distort and clarify our perception? Can intimate observation dissolve apathy? And can brief poems function as phenomenological inquiry: alive, experimental, and porous to the world?

Barron’s work blends interlingual play with ecological attentiveness. Framed by abbreviated Latin plant names, the poems explore how botanical forms echo written and spoken language, creating spaces where nature, speech, and thought intermingle. Early readers have praised Bosk’s “arbor-ardors of speech among species” (Rebecca Kosick) and “flutters of playful intimacy… where ‘scattershot rustlings’ speak back from the plant itself” (Ellen Dillon).

Patrick Barron is the Rome Prize-winning translator of Andrea Zanzotto and a celebrated writer whose work spans poetry, environmental literature, and cultural geography. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

BOSK is available February 28, 2026 through Unsolicited Press, independent bookstores, and online retailers.