Winner of the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry In The Present State of the Garden , both childhood and the natural world are elegized as the speaker works through layers of loss: the dissolution of a marriage and a world on the brink of ecological collapse. She attempts to patch together some kind of new Eden in these aftermaths and to make a home and family from the remnants--memories from girlhood, a stray aunt and a niece, and what's left of her small, once lush garden after the punishing storms of summer. The Present State of the Garden is a clear-eyed, open-hearted poetic memoir.